Bil Sabab Power Hour: Toy Love - Frogs

Sometimes the song just comes to your life and never really goes away even though there is no reason for it to stay. This is how it happened with me and this song.

"Frogs" is a song by a New Zealand punk band Toy Love. I first heard it on a Bomp! anthology many years ago but it was originally recorded in 1979 for seminal New Zealand punk compilation AK79. To this day every time i listen to it - i get the a rush of blood to the head. It is truly intense.

"Frogs" is a "charge of a light brigade" kind of song - straightforward, no-bullshit, exhilarating and epic in the same time. When you hear the song you think "no shit!". It is tough as an avalanche of watermelons - going backwards. As the band leader Chris Knox recalled years later he "tried to imagine the terror of a young girl whose sighting of said amphibians raining from the skies is roundly scorned by authority figures and peers, leading to a complete mental collapse."

The song blasts you off and pummels you to the pulp just because. It is brooding, stomping, crushing extravaganza of guitar, voice, bass, keys and drums. It pounds you to the ground making you believe you're a tree and that's the way it goes. It sounds like a circus with a sisters of mercy rolling in a Hellraiser movie. It crashes everything in sight, then pulls it all together in a ball, jumps on top laughing mad to kick its way deep inside in order to soothe the urge to rock. All while disrupting your perception of reality forever.

"Frogs" is somewhat similarly structured to The Stooges "Sick of You". The intro is purposefully mellow but eerily menacing and then the whole thing turns into relentless onslaught. This song is like experiencing the whole scope of the universe in one gulp - all too much. And that's why it is great.

Rhythm section is like a train - it moves forward with no mercy, you can almost hear the crunching sounds of the bones. Guitar is like a chainsaw that cuts air and turns the whole thing into a bloodbath (you heard right - Toy Love makes the air bleed) while keyboards are like the thing from another world - cold and remote harbinger of doom. There is a fill with a little playful menuet in the middle of the song that comes out of nowhere making feel lost and touched by some kind of tentacle.

Toy Love are stuff of legend in New Zealand - kinda like The Stooges spliced with The Damned except way tougher. If you dare to listen to their anthology you will probably describe it "raw, brutal, rough and bloody". This is punk rock music that is dead set to "shoot, knife, strangle, beat and crucify" the mind - it really pushes listener to the limit without going overboard with noise. No sissy pussy larva lambda.