Frog Of Earth - Frog Of Earth

  • Intelligent frog music.
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  • When I saw that Mel Keane's new record is a concept album about a frog, "Axel F" came to mind—the giddy, proto-EDM track that annoyed people the world over in 2005. Keane looks into the waters of self-reflection on Frog Of Earth and sees his amphibian alter-ego on the surface, but it's a million miles from Crazy Frog. The record is a weird and wonderful, downtempo look into pond life, a ground-level visualization from bulging eyes. Keane is a musician and illustrator from Dublin. A quick browse of his Instagram tells you plenty about his creativity. Profound thoughts are disguised as cartoonish figures. Imaginary creatures come to life. His previous, drum-based releases as Melly and DJ Après Ski have been fun and inventive, but not to the levels Frog Of Earth reaches with no dance floor in mind. Frog Of Earth is like a 4D cinema experience, where water drips from the ceiling and wildlife pops out from under your seat. The Irish label wherethetimegoes tags the album as "intelligent frog music" on Bandcamp—no one genre title would do the record justice. It joins the dots between a frog's deep-bellied call and the sound of a niche modular synthesizer or complex FX chain, set against the kind of buzzing sound design Chris Watson might make for a David Attenborough swamp scene. Many of the album's tracks open with a synthetic recreation of a sound you might hear in day-to-day life as a frog—like cicada buzz or dripping water—before a rounded-off bassline or squelchy arpeggio gives the track vague form. Even on the more rhythmic pieces, like the deconstructed dub techno of "Not Too Much," the arrangements are so loose and free-flowing that you feel the natural order of beings around a pond. In "Newt Dub" and "Salamander Dub," two other characters come and go, but it's the frog that sticks in your mind, vividly but not invasively.
  • Tracklist
      01. Lying Down 02. Means 03. Newt Dub 04. Settle For Less 05. Not Too Much 06. OY SEH UM 07. Salamander Dub 08. The Mouth 09. Settle For Less (Ned's VIP)
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