Album Review: Violet Psalms by Frog Eyes

Near the beginning of Frog Eyes' eighth and final album, Carey Mercer offers a prophetic line: "Sometimes you've got to be / the door that you walk through that sets you free."   Though Violet Psalms was fully finished before the band decided to make it their last album, self-liberation was apparently already playing out in Mercer's mind: a similar sentiment pops up in the very next song — "We shall unlock the door that sets us free" — to highlight its importance.   Fittingly then, Violet Psalms finds Frog Eyes going out in a ….

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It's fitting that Frog Eyes intends for Violet Psalms to be their last album: it sounds like the end of the world. The Canadian band's eighth LP burns with an apocalyptic intensity that feels final and definitive, like some dire prophecy has come to pass. The group has long worked in a sinister vein, though rarely with such sharp-edged precision. These 10 songs are a study in musical dynamics, with ever-shifting instrumentation that leaves moments of brooding calm, and even silence, that are torn by spikes of guitar or swollen with eerie synthesizers, and then punctuated by Carey Mercer's voice.

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