Pressing Concerns: Mister Goblin, ‘Frog Poems’

Release date: April 26^th
Record label: Spartan
Genre: Singer-songwriter, alt-rock, folk rock, post-punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital

Adhering to the rule of threes, Sam Goblin says “fuck” three times on the latest Mister Goblin album, Frog Poems. Although all these f-bombs are dropped in decidedly different ways, I do see a connecting thread between them and taking them as a whole actually provides a surprisingly holistic overview of the singer-songwriter’s ever-expanding but always-recognizable quasi-solo project. Frog Poems‘ second “fuck” is the most immediately attention-grabbing, peppered into mid-record highlight “Lost Data”, a roaring mix of post-hardcore, pop music, and slick alt-rock that’s marked Sam Goblin’s music since his days leading Two Inch Astronaut–“I don’t need a fucking job or retirement plan,” he sneers, a moment of defiance in the midst of a workplace horror anthem that’s decidedly light on answers. “Fit to Be Tied” is the subtlest one, the one it took me a couple of listens to hear– “Damned if I do, then I’m fucked if I don’t,” sing Goblin and Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis together as they move through a subdued, folk-tinged indie pop-style track that Mister Goblin has honed and developed since their 2018 debut EP, Final Boy.

The first “fuck” on Frog Poems is the weirdest one for Mister Goblin, coming early on in the album in a song called “Grown Man” that feels like new terrain for the project, taking utilitarian percussion, electronic tinges, and shined-up acoustic guitars and declaring them congruous parts of the Mister Goblin sound. Everything that I’ve mentioned up until now has figured into Mister Goblin’s sound in some way over the years, but the success of Frog Poems, the fourth Goblin LP, has to do with the synthesis of it all in a confident and completely assured manner. Sam Goblin has led a transient life since Two Inch Astronaut broke up in the late 2010s, moving from his native Maryland to Bloomington, Indiana (where he became part of Kentucky post-punk/new wave group Deady) and is now currently based out of Tallahassee, Florida. Along the way, Sam Goblin was able to establish his current project both as a killer songwriting vehicle with a range far outside his old band (with the bedroom folk touches of 2021’s Four People In An Elevator And One Of Them Is The Devil) and as a strong, dynamic band in its own right (with 2022’s Bunny, featuring bassist Aaron O’Neill and drummer Seth Engel of Options, which was also my favorite album of that year).

Frog Poems is notable in that it’s the first time Sam Goblin has released new music on a label other than Exploding in Sound records (dating back to the first Two Inch Astronaut single in 2012)–and it feels like a new era by collecting and expanding on everything Mister Goblin had done up until that point. After Bunny, one might’ve expected Mister Goblin to become a full-time post-hardcore power trio; or, after Sam moved to Florida, one might’ve expected a return to the project’s solo era. Frog Poems says that Mister Goblin is both of these things–six of the ten songs were recorded by Engel with the full band in Chicago, and four of them were recorded by Deady bandmate Chyppe Crosby in Louisville and conceived as something more “solo-oriented” and acoustic-based. Frog Poems is a statement of active intent, a declaration that regardless of who’s around Sam Goblin and what label he’s on, Mister Goblin will find a way to exist and new music will continue to surface (at this point, there are as many Mister Goblin LPs as Two Inch Astronaut ones, and we’ve every reason to believe that the former will eclipse the latter soon).

Sam Goblin remains one of the best songwriters of his generation and, on Frog Poems, he sounds particularly pointed, a development that helps his latest record sound perhaps even more cohesive than previous albums whose creations were more unified. There are no headfires here–rather than the flex of Bunny’s “Military Discount”, Frog Poems starts with a polished-up track called “Goodnight Sun” (no one is going to call this song “power pop” or “jangle pop”, but don’t tell that to the song’s central hook), and the downcast “The Notary” teases out this subtly huge side of Mister Goblin even further. The “rockers” on Frog Poems all have asterisks–“Run Hide Fight” (apparently inspired by watching kids practice active shooter drills while working in an elementary school) stops and starts in a way recalling Goblin’s D.C. post-hardcore roots, and it takes a while to really start burning, while “Lost Data” sounds angry but not without throwing a bit of the melodic sensibilities of “Goodnight Sun” into the instrumental for good measure. Oh wait, there’s a song called “Open Up This Pit” that features Sam Goblin screaming his head off during the title line? You fool, the rest of the track is a post-punk-alt rock-mid-tempo tune about death (you see, the pit is a metaphor…).

Aside from the previously-mentioned parental advisory sticker bait, it’s the rest of the writing on Frog Poems that holds it together as well. It’s not too hard to draw a line between the breakdown at the middle of the catchy-as-hell acoustic folk-pop of “Grown Man” (“I’m a grown man, like a little fucking baby / It’s not cute and it’s not endearing anymore”) and the loneliness at the core of the sleek alt-rock of “The Notary” (“I want to be a notary / So somebody somewhere would always need me”), between the defeatism in the lilting alt-country of “Saw V” (if you thought that Sam Goblin would make it through a record without a song titled after a horror movie, you’ve clearly not been paying attention) and the “underworked, overpaid” narrator of “Lost Data” (who’s “old enough to be / dying of liver failure, cancer, or my injuries”). The record closes with one of the Louisville recordings, the title track, featuring little more than Sam Goblin, a guitar, and a chorus of frogs playing him in at the song’s outset. “I keep checking the mirrors to see if I have become a vampire / But all I get are sunken eyes and chapped lips,” Goblin sings at the beginning of “Frog Poems” (perhaps the real horror movie plot on the record), and later imagines “Death by fleas / Or death by a thousand overdraft fees”. The band slides into place in the song’s final stanza, backing up Sam Goblin as he sings about being a canary in the Mariana Trench and “a thousand cigarette burns”. Turning dials and phrases until the very end, Mister Goblin ensures that the execution of Frog Poems is perfect and unique to them. (Bandcamp link)