The Golden River

AMG Review of The Golden River

James Christopher Monger
All Music Guide

If David Lynch had written a Motown allad during the filming of Dune, it probably would have sounded a lot like "One in Six Children Will Flee in Boats," the leadoff track on British Columbia's Frog Eyes' sophomore effort, the unsettling, beautiful and difficult Golden River. Songwriter/mouthpiece Carey Mercer twists the forced imagery of Tom Waits into nightmarish, apocalyptic poetry that references beheaded Queens, lonely hunters and bleeding babies with a subdued, yet manic, energy that threatens to explode at any moment. Golden River suggests what would have happened had Eddie Vedder quit Pearl Jam directly after Ten, joined the circus at Coney Island and spent the next ten years perfecting -- with one near-fatal accident -- the art of sword swallowing. Whether he's wistful and hushed -- yet still prone to bursts of falsetto -- ("Latex Ice Age") or assuming the role of a croaking carny ("World's Greatest Concertos"), there's little doubt that Mercer is vehemently content with spending the album's entirety in one form of pain or another. This is garage rock for a Sergio Leone film, and while Melanie Campbell's whip-crack drumming may draw comparisons to Meg White, it's the "Astronomy Domine"-era Pink Floyd tapestry woven by keyboardist Grayson Walker and the springy leads of guitar player Michael Rak that put Golden River on the lost, ripped and burned portion of the ock & roll map. [Golden River was reissued in 2006 by Absolutley Kosher with twelve bonus tracks.]