Album Review: "Blue Bright Ow Sleep" by Frogbelly and Symphony

Blue Bright Ow Sleep gatefold artwork.

Years ago I had a good friend who always told me that he loved music to be off the beaten path.

The stranger the better he always said.

Many of the bands he enjoyed...I couldn't enjoy at all, not because they were too strange, but because they didn't feel like music. Many bands who try to stray away from the well worn methods sound more like a musical abstract than a song.

I find it very hard to get behind that sort of thing. FORESHADOWING.

Today, we're looking at a band, collective, artist hive, colony, something. I don't know what they are besides Frogbelly and Symphony.

Some of them are from Brooklyn, NY and some of them are from Sheffield, UK. Blue Bright Ow Sleep is their debut album.

They also seem a little on the insane side.

Frogbelly and Symphony

I like to envision music as a painting. Heavy chords are oil paints and strings are small little lines. Vocals add color. The solos add passion to the piece.

To consider this record as a painting....well, it would be more of a drawing done by an inmate in a mental institution.

Inside the asylum, a single sheet of  paper has been lushly drawn to create vast shapes and hues, but those pictures have naught to do with each other.

Upon seeing the label folk/noise/progressive...I nearly threw the CD aside, but it's a physical copy and I, if nothing else, listen to every physical CD I receive. I'm very thankful I made that rule for myself.

If I were to simply describe the music to the reader, I feel that they would all think me insane or a liar as well.

For all of my protestations of bands mixing genres and playing all of them, no one has ever come as close to making that statement 100% true as Frogbelly and Symphony.

This album ranges from soft feminine vocal pleas, crazy masculine laments, arena rock power chords, fuzzed out blues solos, King Diamondesque wails, symphonic strings, and all of the lucidity of  Pepper by the Butthole Surfers.

Lyrically speaking, this album is confusing and I think it would take me about seven years to properly unpack these lines.

If you've said that music is too boring, derivative, or anything along those lines, here you go. This album is 100% unique to my ears.

Release: 3/24/15
Genre: God only knows.
Label: Labelship UK
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