Frogs In A Pond: a score for a film nobody shot

Frogs In A Pond is a film score for a film that was never shot. Surprise Chef spend thirteen instrumental tracks building the rooms anyway, and the missing film stops mattering fast. It is dark, patient, and longer than the idea needs.

The group come from Melbourne, where a DIY operation turned into something more settled and a local following turned into a global one. Behind this record sit All News Is Good News and Daylight Savings, both from 2020, Education & Recreation from 2022, and Superb from last year. There was also a 2021 remix set that handed their tracks to Masters at Work and Harvey Sutherland, about as clear a statement as a band can make about where its basslines belong.

Frogs In A Pond is out now, and it is a Melbourne record with one name on the wall. Piero Piccioni, the Italian composer behind Camille 2000 and Colpo Rovente, is in the band's words probably the greatest single influence on the album as a whole. The way in was secondhand: one member found Piccioni's Puppet On A Chain at Northside Records, the shop he works at. Other scores sit alongside it: Sven Libaek's music for Inner Space, the marine documentary Ron and Valerie Taylor made, and Alain Goraguer's La Planete Sauvage. What the band take from all of them is economy.

The sound is a rhythm section first and everything else second. Picked bass carries most of the melody, drums sit dry and forward, and the organ holds the middle where a singer would be. The funk here is rarely warm. When it goes dark it goes properly dark, low end doing the threatening, and the tender passages land harder because nothing in front of them asked permission.

The record opens with a short Inside Voice that hands straight over to Outside Voice, and that pairing sets the pattern: brief pieces dropped between long ones to clear the air. Knuckle Sandwich is one of the brief ones, all title and no fat. Frog Technique and Tadpoles carry the album's name through the running order without ever explaining it. I Love What You've Done With The Place and The Reno are the record's dry joke, two renovation titles in a row. Leg Day runs longest at just under five minutes, and it is the one place the rhythm section stretches without a scene to serve. Where The Crows Fly Backwards and Omnipresence sit late, and the title track goes last, the right call for a record this interested in staging.

It is for anyone who has worn out an Axelrod record or a Meters one, or followed a Carol Kaye bassline to the end of a bar, and for people who leave records on while they work. Anyone who needs a voice in the room should look elsewhere: thirteen tracks pass without one, and that absence is deliberate.

The flaw is length. Thirteen tracks is a lot of mood, and the short pieces stop working as relief somewhere in the middle, turning into residue: Duet arrives, has its say, and leaves nothing behind it. Trim three of these and the whole thing tightens.

What is left when the padding goes is the best version of this band: the organ, the picked bass, the low funk that never quite resolves. A 3.5. Good, and in no hurry. Play it with the lights off and the missing film stops being a problem.

The tracklist

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