Frog - Count Bateman (2019)

Count Bateman sees Frog’s Danny Bateman going solo – hence the album name – and the mood is decidedly low-key and understated, but all the more touching for it. ‘Black Friday’ is among their best tracks, up there with ‘Judy Garland’ and ‘Bones’, the latter of last year’s Whatever We Probably Already Had It. But as ever there are worthwhile melodies and snippets of lyrics throughout the album, which gradually reveal themselves like the fading of a photograph in reverse.

Frog is finding old stuff when cleaning out the house. The things my father owns, and the things my father’s father used to own. I can’t always make out every line Bateman sings, so the songs end up like stories patched together from old relics: photographs of people I don’t know, vinyl singles of 60s hits, love letters on envelopes. There is something strange about the fact that there are people in the past who have lived full-blooded lives, and one can find the same strangeness on Count Bateman.

Frog is a sad dance in the living room, when life turns black-and-white Hollywood film. (Remember Judy Garland). ‘Black Friday’ is essentially an American love song. But it is the opposite of someone like Lana Del Rey, in that it describes the same modern emptiness but from the perspective of a forlorn man. And as a result, there is a glimmer of hope on these songs which is absent from Born to Die.