In many ways, writing about music is a privilege. For one thing, you get an endless supply of new albums for free before the rest of the world gets to hear them. And then you get paid to have opinions about them. But – and I know that this might sound ungrateful and petulant – there are complications. For one thing, criticising music becomes habitual; it changes the way you listen. Every time you hear a great new song, a part of your subconscious begins to file it away for the end-of-year list or formulate new and interesting ways to describe its guitar sound. In this way, a simple exercise – listening to new music purely for pleasure – becomes complicated by the need to articulate an aesthetic judgment.
I started writing seriously about music around the time Frog were piecing together their self-titled debut, which came out on American indie label Monkfish in 2013. In 2015, they found a permanent home on UK-based Audio Antihero. I’ve loved all their albums (six and counting), and I’ve written something about most of them. They have become a fixture in my critical consciousness. Or at least they should have done. But something magical happens whenever Frog release a new record: they make me forget that I’m a music writer. There is a lot of great new music out there, but hardly any of it makes me feel the same way I felt when I was a teenager, queueing outside HMV to get my hands on a copy of Radiohead’s Kid A, or counting down the days until a new Belle and Sebastian release. Frog somehow reignite that joyous flame, every time. I can listen to them as a fan first and a critic second.
So forgive me if this review of their latest album, 1000 Variations on the Same Song, lacks the critical language or the coldly discerning eye you might expect from a grizzled veteran. Indulge my excitement for a few hundred words.
Let’s talk about that album title first: it’s a lie built on a truth. These eleven songs started life, according to Frog frontman Daniel Bateman, as variations on a single theme. The key word here is ‘variations’, because this album is as eclectic as anything Bateman has ever written. The songs may share a common central point, a little glowing light somewhere in their gestation, but they have grown away from that point in wildly different directions. They seem like exercises in exhausting the possibilities of a particular structure, but this being Frog it’s always from the heart, never academic. Bateman has a way of making his songs glow from within: they become highly evocative documents of a certain American way of life, which, while alien to a non-American listener, is hugely alluring. It’s a species of nostalgia, perhaps, but a shaken-up, kaleidoscopic, almost Lynchian nostalgia. A simple lyric like ‘A walk in the park just after dark’ from TOP OF THE POPS VAR. I is somehow loaded with personal meaning and strange intent. It might be the way Bateman’s idiosyncratic voice dips in and out of falsetto, keeping itself guessing.
Or the magic might reside in the way a Frog song flits between genres, impossible to pin down. Is a song like DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II folk or country or rock or soul or emo? And where do those weirdly intense martial drums come from? It doesn’t really matter. It’s about where they go, and where they take you: always away from that familiar centre point where a light glows in your rearview mirror.
And then there’s the timelessness of it. If you miss the references to Gucci socks and amphetamines BLAMING IT ALL ON THE LIFESTYLE VAR. V almost sounds like it could have been written at any point in the last hundred years, and the piano in JUST USE YR HIPS VAR. VI sounds like a drunken Supertramp, dredged up from the Hudson River. The gleefully self-reflexive MIXTAPE LINER NOTES VAR. VII challenges itself to reconcile old-timey twang with scuffed electronics, and succeeds, while also managing to mention My Chemical Romance, Dashboard Confessional, Big Star and The National (and sounding nothing like any of them).
A Bateman melody or lyric can lodge itself somewhere in your brain and then emerge again. You note unexpected links from one song to the next, but also between albums. So while DID SANTA COME VAR. IX (one of the best Christmas songs of recent years, by the way) has lyrical echoes of WHERE DO I SIGN VAR. III, it also calls back to the last verse of Space Jam, from that 2013 debut. But the reflections are distorted, the memories incomplete. These distortions are themselves mirrored in Frog’s unusual physical status as a band: in a strange kind of dance, original drummer Thomas White was replaced in 2019 by Bateman’s brother Steve, before rejoining, this time on bass.
Musically, 1000 Variations almost has the feel of a career overview. The slacker country of WHERE U FROM VAR. VIII recalls 2019’s Count Bateman, while some of the tracks on the first half are more in the spikier spirit of the first two albums. Opening track STILLWELL THEME – the only song not considered a ‘variation’ – has a tumbling piano that shows the influence of classic songwriters like Carol King (and a melody that has something of Graham Nash’s Our House about it), and wouldn’t have been out of place on 2023’s Grog. Closer ARTHUR MCBRIDE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE VAR. X is harder to pin down. It starts off like the more acoustic portions of Led Zeppelin III – an influence explored previously on Grog’s Ur Still Mine – before morphing into a discursive folk ballad, like early Paul Simon with substance abuse issues.
All of which is just my roundabout starstruck music reviewer way of saying that Daniel Bateman is (still) one of the finest, most singularly gifted songwriters in the world, and that Frog are just as strange and just as exciting as they were when I started doing this over a decade ago. 1000 Variations might dip liberally into America’s grimy gutters, it might sometimes get its sustenance from heartbreak, but I still can’t help but listen to the whole thing with a giant lunatic grin on my face.
1000 Variations on the Same Song (14th February 2025) Audio Antihero
Order via Bandcamp: https://heyitsfrog.bandcamp.com/album/1000-variations-on-the-same-song
Tour Dates
8 MARCH – Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, US
22 MARCH – The Echo, Los Angeles, CA, US
23 MARCH – Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, CA, US
25 MARCH – The Black Lodge, Seattle, WA, US
26 MARCH – The Fox Cabaret Projection Room, Vancouver, BC, Canada
27 MARCH – Mississippi Studios, Portland, OR, US
28 MARCH – Treefort Music Fest, Boise, ID, US
3 APRIL – Bowery Ballroom, New York City, NY, US
11 APRIL – Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, US
