Cult-rock band Frog Eyes announce their second album since reforming in 2021, and their tenth record in a consistently bewildering and inspired catalogue. Formed at the turn of the century in 2001, brushing shoulders with fellow travelers/beloved songwriters and musicians, beloved but never in the dead epicentre of a scene or a marketable, commodified era, this record bursts with a joyful fealty to songs, to albums, to playing the song you want to hear with the people you want to play with in a space that lifts it all up.
The Open Up, Frog Eyes’ 10th proper album, was tracked to tape by ace-engineer John Raham (Frazey Ford, Destroyer, Vancouver new-jazz recorder), recorded off-the-floor, with subsequent vocal overdubs and electric guitar and grand piano flourishes. Huffy-puffy rock and roll, open-ended mid-tempo dreaminess, sad and soft love songs: it’s an emotional and spatial journey, and meant to be experienced as an album. Electric guitar, piano-like synthesizer, frantic and frenetic drums and melodic bass fill up the corners and create a foundational support for the words, spit-sung into a special German tube microphone and shuttled out to a Studer tape machine to create the syllabic echoes, and the sounds as they converge in the centre of your speakers make us think of 1995 emo, at times, in its chord structures, a remnant/echo of a youth playing in that specific genre, post-punk in its wired up tautness and Fall-like square edges, weird blues, baby-bad-boy goth rock, and then, in its final third, a spacious rise-up that revels in more “open” modalities.
Obstinately refusing to have any digital devices in the “writing room” in the search for focused daily practice, riffs were recalled if strong, and words written into a D and D map book (the principal songwriter does not read music formally and relies on memory and triad chord shapes). Penned in the years of late 2023 and early 2024—tough, ugly years like so many years before them (sure), but, for the creators, feeling especiallytough and ugly. Existential/ecological dread and jubilant hope/love are its two poles, a push-pull tension that mirrors the push-pull tension between rhythm and melody. Nine songs written for the record, and one last song written as a devotion song.
Underneath, (as in an underground river), the entire project, starting in 2001 and coming up on a 25th silver jubilee, is a flowing devotion to the idea of the album, the idea that a collection of songs could work together to create a body of meaning beyond each individual tune; absent are any overarching themes or conceits, present is a flood of pondering, of noticing, of trying to work it out, the sound of two years of blinking. Personnel are: Ryan Beattie, bass (and singing); Shyla Seller, Keys; Melanie Campbell, Drums; Carey Mercer, Guitar (and singing).
About Fortunato Durutti Marinetti
Born in Turin and based in Toronto, Daniel Colussi has been playing in underground bands within various subterranean communities for the last twenty years. Adopting the nom de guerre Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, he self-released the Desire cassette in 2020, which was quickly followed with Memory’s Fool (Soft Abuse/Bobo Integral) in 2022 and the Desire LP (Second Spring), also 2022. The third Fortunato Durutti Marinetti album is titled Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean and it arrives November 2023 via Quindi Records and Soft Abuse.
Colussi draws inspiration from the restless, explorative spirit of 1970s songwriters such as Robert Wyatt, Annette Peacock and Lou Reed — artists more committed to the spirit of their own individual expression than to genre tropes.
Working with producer Sandro Perri, the intention with Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean was to pursue an organic-hybridity in which synthesizers, saxophones and violins coalesce into a unified whole.
For physical events that happen at a specific time. For example a concert, or dance performance. If there are multiple shows, you can still duplicate your event to cover them all.
In-Person Event
Wed. May 21st + Add to Calendar
Hotel Wolfe Island
8:30pm - 11:30pm
$20
