Few sounds are as exhausting and as exhilarating as the voice of Carey Mercer. Whether with Frog Eyes, with myriad other projects, or solo, he conveys joy and bitterness, anger and bliss, with an allure and conviction few can equal.
Skin of Evil is Mercer's second full length release as Blackout Beach (his solo name). In ten songs over 30 minutes, he offers different perceptions about and around the figure and persona of "Donna." Her lovers relate their sparkling, fractured, obstuse tales, laden with bile and self-loathing, and the picture emerges of Donna as a siren-like destroyer of hearts and minds. If this seems a recipe for an unpleasant wallow in self-absorbed pity, the result sounds quite the opposite. The record is partly about obsession and, fittingly, Mercer knows how to gradually build a weird—almost sexual—tension and release it without deflating the entire atmosphere. The songs crackle with violent delirium; with longing, lust, and regret.
It's not an easy listen but there are sections of undoubted prettiness. Opener "Cloud of Evil" has lovely pulsing dubbish undertones and a stuttering vocal rhythm to match. "Nineteen, One God, One Dull Star" is infused with a hazy, swaying version of the kind of languid glamor managed a long time ago by Bowie on his live version of "Sweet Thing." Eventually, wider themes emerge than the Donna syndrome and it becomes clear that, as with most intimate human events, sole blame can't be heaped upon anyone: it takes (at least) two to tango. Amidst these complex crooned rants we also hear Donna's brief right-of-reply, the layered ecstatic chant that is "Woe To The Minds Of Soft Men."
One of my gripes with so much singing done by independent rock musicians is what I call the glorification of the mumble. This is often either an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the absence of feeling and meaning by hinting at incoherence or to obscure a thin and narrow range by distractions such as muddy production. This can even be presented as a virtue wherein "the voice democratically shares the mix with other instruments" or some such guff. By contrast, Mercer's cathartic singing hides behind nothing. Idiosyncratic it may be, but at least it is gloriously over the top. His claustraphobic, theatrical utterances (and the terrific accompanyments of Carolyn Mark, Megan Boddy, and Melanie Campbell) make the naturalistic versions of sincerity from the mouths of the grey legions of indieland seem like flaccid, pale, apologies.
This may be Mercer's most uncluttered recording, but it doesn't lack any intensity. The wider themes on Skin of Evil seem to go in and out of focus: self-reliance, failure, politics, salvation: and the lack of all of these. And from within the chiming guitar, thudding percussion, and layers of feverish, howling and cooing, some classic lines float by: "she burned the orphanage but saved the payroll", "we break our paddles in woe". At one point Carey Mercer sings "The automatic and justified response to a cruel and graceless age is to run away". But it doesn't sound like he's retreating from concocting the audio equivalent of molten lava any time soon.
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