I consider myself a record label whore. If something comes out on a music label that I love and trust, I will listen to it. Matador is probably my favorite label, as it has/had four of my favorite bands of all time on its roster. In high school I would try to listen to every Matador artist I could get my hands on. Even though I lived in the Napster age, I still bought music, so most of the albums I would get from the used record store down the street. In college everything got easier when I worked for the radio station. I also made a close friend who had a comparable collection of CDs. One of his recommendations was a band on Matador that I had heard of, but never heard, as their albums were way out of print. The Frogs are a band of two brothers, Jimmy and Dennis Flemion, that Beck had sampled and whose biggest cheerleader is Billy Corgan. They were not quite on my radar, but one listen to It’s Only Right & Natural and I was hooked.
Their lyrics were brash, racy, and everything an immature college kid would get a kick out of. But looking beyond the radical tracks about gender, sexuality, race, and class, you had a band that knew how to push buttons, be in your face but also disappear into the background and be easily listenable. As a gay man, I never found any of their anti-homosexual rhetoric offensive because I was in on the joke. This is the kind of music that would drive currently active bloggers wild, but The Frogs aren’t idiots like Tyler, the Creator. They know exactly what they are doing and are beloved by indie rock fans because of it.
Last night the Matador Record’s blog posted that Dennis Flemion was declared dead after going missing in Racine County Lake on Saturday. This is a tragic loss for the indie rock community, and I am not one to usually post RIP stories, but his death has shaken me. The Frogs are a very overlooked band that most people don’t know, or couldn’t care less about and that is a shame. This is especially sad knowing that the band just released not one, but two new albums, Squirrel Bunny Jupiter Deluxe and Count Yer Blessingsz, on iTunes last week. If anything good comes out of Flemion’s untimely death, it might be more people will tune in and The Frogs can gain a bigger fan base. On a selfish note, reissues would be nice too.
Today’s song of the day is the fist track from my favorite Frogs album My Daughter the Broad, “Reelin’ and Rockin #1.” The lo-fi track encapsulation of everything the Frogs do best.
