There is so much good free music floating around on the internet that it sometimes feels if you know where to look, that you might never need to buy another record again. But every once in a while an album comes along that is worth putting your hands in your pockets for, and Frogville’s “A Bug-Eyed Swamp” is one of those albums. For the price of a packet of cigarettes you can have yourself 11 tracks of psychedelic pop home brew, songs that stick but not as sickly sweet as bubblegum, lo-fi bones but with a shiny studio feel to the skin, and experimental without losing sight of the raw solarized melodies that underpin it.

Song writers seem to fall into one of two hands. In one are those who can’t help but keep writing, like butterflies flitting from one idea-flower to the next, putting quantity over quality and hopefully somewhere in amidst all those rushed recordings will be something worth keeping hold of. In the other are individuals like Frogville’s Jason Raspa, blessed with the patience and determination to take an idea-flower and keep tending to it, only walking away from it when it’s grown as high as it can. I first heard about this New York band back in June 2007 and spent the next year and a half trying to get a Frogville track on one of the Daydream Generation compilations. The first time I finally heard any music was an album of demos in January of 2009 that confirmed a hunch I had that this was the best band we never featured. Now, six months and a crash course in audio mastering later, “A Bug Eyed-Swamp” is grown. The Daydream Generation compilations might now be but ghostly soundtracks of the past, but the regret that we never got a Frogville song onto any of them is at least alleviated somewhat by the brilliance of this finished record.

From the word go, with the swirling psychedelic guitar lines of “I Believe In You”, this is something of an all-out assault on the parts of your brain that instinctively hoover up hooks and retain them, regurgitating them at random intervals throughout your waking day. The first five songs of “A Bug Eyed-Swamp” are the equivalent of a top-heavy bombardment of melody. For those of you going into it blind, I’d be very surprised if you’re not waving the white flag of submission a couple of verses into the upbeat 90s indie-pop of second track “Just Like Sunday”. Three through five are my own favourites – “The Speed of a Crawl” is cinematic and sweeping, a sonic lullaby for the frazzled heads of the 21st century. “I’m A Bee” is comical and catchy as fuck, combining Jason’s reassuringly loveable voice singing “Collecting honey for the Queen / I love her, I think you know what I mean / There’s too many guys in the hive / She doesn’t even know that I’m alive”, with suitably bee-powered musical swagger. The vocals, like the range of guitar riffs, walking bass-lines, steady drums, and liberal helpings of effects and sound tricks that are central to the Frogville sound, are actually each but a part of the well-oiled machine, each doing their bit, carrying it forward, letting each song breathe bedecked in blinking lights into the muddy swamp of creation. You won’t play this record to your friends and say “Listen to the guitar on this”, or “What is he doing here?”, but you will put it on and let it play out saying “Listen to all of this”.

Fifth track “The Light You Give” is as close as you’ll get to a standard ballad form – an ageless melodic love song where “The light you give shines”. Simply put – it’s fucking beautiful. From the blistering start, the rest of the record is more of a blur of ideas and sounds. The mainly instrumental and eerily weird title track signals the end of the “song” songs and the beginning of something a little darker and less deliberate. Frogville shows that the psych-pop salvos are just a part of the bigger picture (albeit a glorious part). Equally the machine is at home producing freaky indie guitar blow-outs “Time is Growing”, druggy Jonestown Massacre-esque shoegaze funk amalgamations (“Turns to Gold”), dig up something that sounds like it fell off the edge of “Forever Changes” (“Mexico”), or do lush country drone experiments like the closing “Speed of Disillusionment”. Penultimate track “Face” deserves a sentence or two on its own. Like a lost song from 1966, think somewhere in between The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground, tambourine punctuated tunnel of stark sound and a vocal melody that sounds like something you should have heard somewhere before, but know that you haven’t.

Truthfully I don’t know what you can do with five dollars these days, but there can’t be many things you can buy as worthwhile as Frogville’s “A Bug-Eyed Swamp”. It’s an instant shot of soulful pick-me-up and harmonic cool-me-down in equal measures, and a fine, fine debut album from someone who makes studio recordings sound just about obsolete. More importantly, it’s a little help towards maintaining a 4-track recorder apparently on its last legs. You might have to wait two more years for the next audio chapter, but if “A Bug-Eyed Swamp” is anything to go by then it’ll be well worth the wait.

Find out more about Frogville and buy “A Bug-Eyed Swamp” here:

www.myspace.com/frogville