It simply wasn’t enough. Sure, Violet Psalms was a great send-off, a late-career peak for Frog Eyes who have now packed it in after proving they’ve still “got it.” But the band isn’t exactly done, as Live at the Moroccan Lounge, a document of their July 3 show at the L.A. venue, proves conclusively: middle age means nothing, and energy stores can be bottomless.
Yet here I sit behind a computer screen, munching on a doughnut, middle-aged af, trying not to paraphrase Neil Young’s burning out/fading away bullshit.
Speaking of endless youth, Moroccan Lounge, which drops digitally September 28 on the ol’ Bandcamp page, is like a Frog Eyes greatest hits collection, a “definitive” document in the words of Carey Mercer himself. Apparently shedding 17 whole years from their lives (because that’s how long they’ve been making music), the band rips through the classics like carefree twenty-somethings. Here’s the tracklist. Drool with me.
Live at the Moroccan Lounge tracklist:
01. Your Bosses’ Shirt, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
02. Idle Songs, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
03. I Like Dot Dot Dot, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
04. I Ain’t Around Much, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
05. Masticated Outboard Motors, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
06. Good Natured Ribbing, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
07. Claxxon’s Lament, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
08. The Policy Merchant, Solo, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
09. Three Men Drown in a River, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
10. The Oscillator’s Hum, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
11. Bushels, solo, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
12. A Latex Ice Age, Live at the Moroccan Lounge
13. Encore Clapping/Not an Asterism but a Dinkus
14. Sound Travels From the Snow to the Dark
15. The Idiot’s Idiotic Storm (Bonus)
But wait: what’s that closing the album, “The Idiot’s Idiotic Storm”? Is that… a NEW AND EXCLUSIVE FROG EYES TUNE, culled from the Violet Psalms sessions because it was just too… on the nose, thematically, for these “wicked times”?
You bet it is.
That’s the hook.
So as the band shakes the dust from these old chestnuts and the novel becomes autobiography, so too do we dust off our PayPal accounts and head on over to Frog Eyes Bandcamp dot com, more confident than ever that our lives meant something as reflected in the last stand of one of our favorite bands. At least that’s what I tell myself as I brush the doughnut crumbs from my fat walrus mustache.
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