Frog Eyes Shares "I Was An Oligarch" Single + Lyric Video via Brooklyn Vegan

Frog Eyes Shares "I Was An Oligarch" Single + Lyric Video via Brooklyn Vegan The Bees LP Due April 29 via Paper Bag Records

Photo Credit to Soloman Chiniquay PRE-SAVE: Frog Eyes - The Bees Pre-Save / Bandcamp LISTEN/WATCH & SHARE: Frog Eyes - "I Was An Oligarch" Stream / YouTube LISTEN/WATCH & SHARE: Frog Eyes - "When You Turn On The Light" Stream / YouTube "Beautiful, noisy and singularly Frog Eyes" - Brooklyn Vegan "The song is a subtle yet dazzling bit of sonic art. Constructed on minimal sounds, a plucky bass and simple drums while ambient tones, sideways guitar shapes cascading down while Carey Mercer chews the vocal scenery and spits it out. As singer-songwriter, guitarist he paints an almost slow motion darkly drawn picture informed by the messy, painful stuff of life and quite possibly paint fumes." - American Pancake "The Canadian quartet are masters of assembling music that sounds like the intro to an inevitable drama. 'When You Turn on the Light' is no exception." - Alt77 "Mercer’s singular voice, nightmare-bent and horror-pained, has put him in league with such eccentric vocalists as Tom Waits and Frank Black, and he shares with them the status of the truly inimitable. That his voice survived throat cancer undiminished is all the more extraordinary. It’s what gives Violet Psalms its otherworldly power—especially on its two final songs, 'Unconscious Missive' and 'Pay for Fire,' heartening demonstrations of Mercer’s expressiveness and range." - Pitchfork "The claustrophobia of all the best Frog Eyes tunes — like you’re in a tiny elevator with Carey and his guitar, and he’s playing and singing right next to you, right in your ear, and you can smell the beer on his breath and he’s staring right at you with those wild eyes, and all you can do is stare straight ahead as the illuminated floor numbers slowly decrease, and maybe you press the 'Lobby' button a few times in a desperate attempt to make the elevator descend faster, and you definitely pray that this will end soon (but shoot, you still kind of like it, and golly, it’s not that long a song anyway, maybe you can relax, just a little) — weighs heavily, a cloud of anxiety presaging a panic attack." - Tiny Mixtapes  "The Canadian band’s eighth LP burns with an apocalyptic intensity that feels final and definitive, like some dire prophecy has come to pass [...] These 10 songs are a study in musical dynamics, with ever-shifting instrumentation that leaves moments of brooding calm, and even silence, that are torn by spikes of guitar or swollen with eerie synthesizers, and then punctuated by Carey Mercer’s voice." - Paste "Violet Psalms finds Frog Eyes going out in a burst of vitality. It's a mesmerizing album, full of world-weary terror and transcendent grace." - Exclaim! "Beautifully complicated, creative and strange [...] Not only does Mercer spin you around with his unique vocals, but he completely turns you inside out with his absurdist poetry." - Slug Magazine Today, Vancouver indie-rock greats Frog Eyes share "I Was An Oligarch," the second track off their forthcoming comeback album (their first album in four years), The Bees (due April 29 via Paper Bag Records). Speaking on the brand new single, Carey Mercer (vocals/guitar) wrote: "The song comes from considering a very specific and rarified moment in my life. I was 19, 20, 21. I wasn't playing much music, maybe a little drums. I didn't care about music—I might have had ten tapes that I would listen to while painting, mostly recordings of Brave New Waves that I had taped to listen to in the day. Everyone else had music, they were always playing it. I did love to go to little concerts at the sports bar, in part to mess with the band, to tear them down from their 8” stage in the corner of the sports bar, to swill pitchers and disrupt their set and somehow, in my thinking, become one with them, to ascend like a little oligarch. Then I bought an Aria Pro II hollowbody guitar from my best friend's uncle Denny and, regrettably, became one of them." The lyric video's director Derek Janzen wrote: "The main thing I wanted for this video was to try to juxtapose the driving rhythm of the song by holding on shots a bit longer and keeping the motion in frame to a minimum. I was fortunate enough to film in an old house near Deer Lake in Burnaby that my friend and fellow musician, Nicholas Krgovich, was staying in that looked perfect for what I was after. The hope is that these ghostly wafts of smoke within this empty home represent a sort of haze of memory that I think Carey’s lyrics so wonderfully portray in the song." The Bees arrives after the band's stint under the name Soft Plastics, following Frog Eyes' "final" album, Violet Psalms, released in 2018. Frog Eyes - "I Was An Oligarch" Directed by Derek Janzen   FROG EYES LINKS Bandcamp | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify