I did some digging to discover a little more about the identity of the artist behind Frog Fortress, and the most personal element I found was a Reddit post on r/Skatepunk, which said, “My solo project. Let me know if it sucks.” The answer, of course, is no. No, it does not suck. And while I still have little clue who wrote the music for Frog Fortress’s debut EP, Bird Watching Music, I am very glad I have heard it, because it is very good.
We covered Frog Fortress’s demo here in October, where our writer Josh said, “Everything happens in one explosive burst of energy.” That energy does not decrease on Bird Watching Music, even though two of the songs extend their runtimes by a significant degree. No songs on the demo lasted more than two minutes, whereas on the EP, “Shades of Green” passes the two-minute mark and “Easy Mode” stretches to an almost four-minute-long opus. However, all five tracks on the EP go down easily, thanks to the masterwork of the skate punk maven behind Frog Fortress’s fuzzy sound.
A mix of lo-fi, true punk, and pop progressions, Bird Watching Music certainly doesn’t fit its title, as you would much prefer to listen to this EP while slamming a soda can on the ground and then doing a kickflip in front of a cop car than you would commenting on the patterns on the wings of a warbling white-eye. But it fits when you consider that Frog Fortress calls their music “skate punk from a Tokyo-based gaijin, where “gaijin” means foreigner. Frog Fortress considers itself out of place, and yet, its music fits into the punk lexicon regardless of its location. Regardless of where they wrote Bird Watching Music – Tokyo, or Toronto, or Texas, or Taiwan – it would still slap just as hard.
Take a listen to Bird Watching Music below. While Frog Fortress has no active social media, stick with Start Track, as we’re quite sure we’ll hear more from this budding punk artist sometime soon and post it.
Written by Will Sisskind
