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: : Review : :
In 2001, Frogg Café, an obscure New York prog band with a serious Zappa fixation,
released their first eponymous album. Nearly no one noticed. While the album
certainly showed that the band had chops, the production quality was not nearly so
good and the songwriting was more in the nature of a tribute to heroes than the
reason for the recording. The album seemed to be one for the MCI plan: friends and
family.
Enter the internet. See, a funny thing happened next. Through connections made on
various internet prog lists by band members and those on their respective MCI plans,
the band won a gig at Jim Robinson’s Metlar-Bodine Proghouse in New Jersey. The good
news: they filled the place. The bad news: “filled,” Metlar-Bodine seats 50…soaking
wet. The other good news: someone taped the gig.
Enter the internet again. See, another funny
thing happened. CDR burns of the tape began making the rounds of some of those same
internet lists. And it was a very good tape indeed. Clearly the band had progressed
since their time in the studio. Now they were more than promising chopmeisters who
had gone to school on Zappa and the deities of American fusion jazz. Now they had
chemistry to add to the musicianship of the performance. Suddenly the band had a
buzz about them. So it was with the sound of bees in their ears that Frogg Café
headed back into the studio.
What they emerged with is a remarkable album. Nothing in Frogg Café’s past – not the
Metlar-Bodine tape and certainly not the debut album – suggested that they were
capable of producing an album of the astonishing quality of Creatures. The album
opens with “All This Time,” a driving, powerful number that owes far more to Red-era
King Crimson than Zappa. Where Frank Camiola’s guitars had provided background
colorations on the first album, they are the main player here. And it is not just
the influence of Fripp and the sainted Frank that is evident in Camiola’s playing;
on the lead there is also more than a mere nod in the direction of Roine Stolt.
Similarly, Nick Lieto’s vocals have come to the foreground on this album. Where
Lieto’s vocal contribution to the first album seemed to be more the fact of vocals
then the vocals themselves, nothing could be further from the truth here. On the
title track, for example, Lieto shines. His tone and phrasing in the difficult
jazzy, syncopated passages that define the songs are perfect. It is difficult to
imagine them done better, or even as well. While the song is far closer to the Zappa-influenced
style of the first album, there is as much Canterbury as Mothers in evidence. And as
the album unfolds, so does the evidence of the band’s influences: Gong, RIO, Village
Vanguard-era Coltrane, Dixie Dregs and even Kansas.
But it is for the twenty one minute epic, “Waterfall Caravan” that this album will
be remembered. For all of the lengthy prog epics that have flowed from the pens of
Neal Morse and Roine Stolt of late, this one clearly harkens back to Genesis. And
yet in “Waterfall Caravan,” the Froggies seem to be referring less to “Supper’s
Ready” and the Gabriel-era then the Genesis of Trick of the Tail and Wind &
Wuthering. With Camiola’s acoustic guitar work, Lieto’s melotron swells and vintage
analog keyboard sounds, Guarnieri’s timely crash cymbal – not to mention the linear
structure and the heartbreakingly beautiful melody -- it is as if the
Hackett-Banks-Rutherford-Collins lineup had recorded the side-long epic they never
actually recorded.
And yet, as tempting as it is to view “Waterfall Caravan” and the entire Creatures
album in terms of the various influences to which the band provides citing
references, the more remarkable aspect of the album is the degree to which all of it
is delivered from a uniquely Frogg Café point of view. Whether the references are to
Red-era Crimson, Zappa, Flower Kings or Wind & Wuthering Genesis, what it all really
sounds like is Frogg Café.
And that sounds good. Really good. If Frogg Café continues to improve from Creatures
as dramatically as they improved to get to Creatures, future acts may be citing to
them. Perhaps they should already.
9 out of 10 stars (and it is only the uneven recording quality on the album that
denies them the last star).
Reviewed by: Aaron Jazy
Visit the artist website:
http://froggcafe.com/
: : DISCOGRAPHY : :
Frogg Café - 2001
Creatures - 2003
: : HONORS : :
Album of the month for August |
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