Canadian band Frog Eyes depict a swift descent into emotional chaos in their hypnotizing Indie-Rock single “When You Turn On the Light” from the upcoming album The Bees, set to release in April 2022. Like a crude, sobering elixir force-fed down your gullet, you are reminded of the impetuous cataclysms of life – death, illness and hysteria. It portrays when the allegorical light switches on within your head, and catastrophic losses come to full realization.
Oh when you turn on the light / But you don’t understand
The four-minute track opens with guitar riffs that bend in psychedelic ripples, evoking the vision of heat waves on hot sand. They glide you into the song to meet lethargic drumming and Carey Mercer’s sultry, snarled vocals. The energy feels akin to waking up dazed from a day-time nap, shocked to find the day has eclipsed to pitch black evening. Quickly, the song becomes unsettlingly visceral, and Frog Eyes placing you within a hellish room where you wake up in confusion – headache pounding due to metallic, unnatural scents. Dissolving gel, gesso chalk and enamel are all substances mentioned – Mercer stretching each item out in thrilling anticipation like the items on a serial killer’s shopping list. Genre and subject matter intersect perfectly in this gothic-adjacent track, whereby the horrors of reality are enough to invoke an atmosphere of the fiery inferno.
And the enameled smell / sends your headache to hell
The lyrics continue to be haunting in their forthright divulgences of death; a roommate is lost to heroin, and her boyfriend is struck by a car in the early hours of day. Percussion angrily builds up tempo and Mercer climbs in pitch, desperation bubbling as he pieces together a reality that is too horrific to bear. Death in Western cultures is somewhat taboo, yet to be touched by death multiple times is an unavoidable life experience for all who grow old. Songs like “When You Turn On the Light”, which plainly face themes of grief and terror, are consequently important to the musical canon, especially to individuals dealing with a the alienating experience of loss. In his rumination of the death surrounding him, Mercer contemplates his own resurrection line, a terrifying evocation that to face the lengths of the mortality of others is in many ways, to recognize your own.
In the harbor of hell / Wait what, the moon is a bell?
I am losing the shore and its safe string of lights
The tale continues with eerie depictions of insanity through warped inanimate objects; everything in the protagonist’s life distorts as grief ensnares them. One begins to question, when the events of our earthly time reflect more that of the hellscape, how are we supposed to react with sanity? “When You Turn On the Light” illustrates that, as time takes more from us, we propel further away from our shoreline into the darkness of the unknown, and a feeling of familial comfort and safety is lost. We can only hope that eventually, time will heal the flesh wounds it creates, and the new lights of a different shore may become visible.
We should be so lucky if Frog Eyes’ upcoming album matches the compelling tone of “When You Turn On the Light”, a mind-bending project teeming with imagery, melancholia and a refreshing candor.
