There is a great deal to cry about when listening to Tears of the Valedictorian. If you are a novice to Canadian band Frog Eyes, their fourth album will come as a ball-tearing shock –  try earlier albums, Golden River (2003), Folded Palm (2004), or Bloody Hand (2006) to see if you can stand the pace. Carey Mercer, the driving force behind Frog Eyes is an acquired taste in his own right. Various musicians have drifted in and out of his muse, notably Dan Bejar of New Pornographers and Destroyer whom he collaborated with in Swan Lake. And while the current Frog Eyes line-up includes Mercer’s wife Melanie Campbell on drums, Michael Rack on bass, McCloud Zicmuse on guitar and Spencer Krug on keyboards; it is Mercer who stokes the central cauldron.

Tears is a 36 minute bleak and frenetic post prog/hard rock concept album about graduation. As a Canadian, Mercer seems to be taking a look over the border where the school of life has become a dangerous, evil place. It’s not just the seats of learning, but in ‘Evil Energy’ he sees it is all pervasive. What are young people graduating to? What is a poor boy going to do? Listen to Tears of the Valedictorian I suspect. But hold on to your loose bits because the manic ride is also a journey to the centre of Rick Wakeman. Mercer rants, rails and screeches in tones that echo Ian Gillen in Deep Purple’s ‘Child in Time’. To call it indie rock is a safe bet, because Tears is a concept album with its roots flailing back to the free form expression of 1970s progressive rock minus the niceties of flute and synth.

If you are a newbie it is a rough ride. Hardened Frog-eyers appreciate the band’s expressions of those deeper frustrations and freely validated darker thoughts. The album as a whole is relentless and the tracks seem to bludgeon up against each other, percussion and guitars abruptly shifting gear as if on the road to hell, the wheels swerving to avoid a heap of rubble. Then Mercer’s lyrics follow, they are the ravings of a madman.

Attacks on fallen patriarchs litter the lyrics. In ‘Idle Songs’ a Roman Ambassador is toppled and exposed as a plaster god; in ‘Caravan Breakers’ a cold lieutenant’s dad hints at a familial demon. In ‘Stockades’ the General and the Admiral are reduced to gutless chickens and in ‘Reform the Countryside’ we get “All exit patients shall book exit flights/and all the punks cry “deliver us from the night.”  There are some just plain silly lyrics in ‘Evil Energy’ but this is rock music not a graduate’s thesis. “And the blood from the Legionnaire will spout from his underwear/and the wicked shall grin as I spout.” At best, Mercer’s lyrics are written like a kind of rock haiku with dense, pictographic images, at worst they resemble a trail of unconnected word splatter, you would need something like a degree in forensic musicology to analyse them.

‘Eagle Energy’ is a nine minute climax tipping into its prog-rock influences. It mocks the leaders in a cynical valedictory farewell to them as they fall. Here, Spencer Krug gets to shine like any good prog-rock keyboardist there is almost a solo. Finally we arrive battered and bruised at ‘Bushels’. Here we lay wasted like Mercer’s wasted landscape where “the wheat’s got to last”.  When Mercer states that he is the singer and he sings in your home, he is saying that’s all there is, refusing to pretend he has the answers. The melodic, quiescent 45 second coda ‘My Boats they Go.’ is the only pause he will concede.

Although only 36 minutes long, Tears of the Valedictorian is an uncompromising, hard-to-listen-to quagmire not helped by production values that are quite ordinary. At times the sound seems muffled, other times the VU meter suddenly peaks, as if the sound engineer is adding his own riffs.

Mercer attempts to get his message across with a style of singing which is a brutish form of keening, a loud wailing funeral lament.  Maybe that is what it takes, because Frog Eyes play like they want to wake up the living as well as the dead.