(2020) Frog of Earth - Frog of Earth


Review:
…Mel 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)


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, electronic
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits