At the end of the day

>> Frog Eyes’ Carey Mercer should get
a grant for being so fuckin’ artsy

MAKING THE LEAP: Frog Eyes

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“I’m in Austin, the Paris of Texas,” says Carey Mercer. “No offence to Paris, Texas.”

From Victoria, B.C., Frog Eyes is touring the American south for the first time. Mercer claims that he, his wife/drummer Melanie Campbell, bassist Michael Rak and guitarist Ryan Beattie (of Chet, Himalayan Bear) booked the tour as if it were their last, pushing them to play new towns. But fans needn’t fret, they’re only “pretending.” After all, the band’s latest album is a rebirth, like a pledge to stay sane and sober after a long, hard night of excess. Tears of the Valedictorian stays true to the band’s driving, guttural sound and convoluted costume drama, but it feels like a cool breeze after their infernal 2005 LP, The Folded Palm. The Mirror spoke to Mercer about changes, and his side project Swan Lake, with Spencer Krug (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown) and Dan Bejar (Destroyer).

Mirror: Before we get onto the new record, the previous three have been described as a trilogy. How would you define the link?

Carey Mercer: At one point, I had this concept where each record represented a portion of the day. The Bloody Hand’s like the blistering sun and The Golden River was the twinkling sunset—twilight, my favourite time—and then The Folded Palm was the sickness of deep night. I wanted to envision the environment and the people that had to live through the day—to me, that works well enough to say that they’re connected, but that’s pretty fuckin’ artsy isn’t it? I should get a Canada Council grant for that.

The new record is way more focused on the actual tonality of music and less on some kind of philosophical notion of the mechanics of the world and our interior universe. It’s really an embracing of the fact that we’re a band. It’s more of a rock record to my ears than an art-rock record.

M: I’m curious about how you record your vocals. There’s so much going on there, but does the desired effect come naturally, or do you do take after take, experimenting?

CM: A song can be quite easy to sing in front of people—I can sing to an audience in my one fashion, which is this kind of unending bellow, I suppose—but on the record, I don’t necessarily want that, so it can be really frustrating and challenging, finding the right way to sing a song.

M: Swan Lake happened between the last two Frog Eyes records. How did that come about?

CM: We were in Europe together, doing Frog Eyes and Destroyer songs, and Spencer’s obviously an immensely talented songwriter on top of being an immensely talented piano player and it just felt like there was an opportunity there that could be both really fun and also kinda neat. It was just lingering around after that, waiting.

M: Will there be a second record?

CM: We’ve committed to doing a second record. There were a ton of ideas that were just starting to come into focus by the end of it, and there were things that I would have liked to have done that we didn’t do. It was quite a bit of fun—we didn’t really stress out about what was going to be made, it was just singing songs with your buds, you know?

With Alex Delivery and Himalayan Bear
at la Sala Rossa on Tuesday May 22, 9 p.m., $12