Blackout Beach – Fuck Death (2011)

Uz ovaj glas, sto se mene tice: fuck death, life...and everything else!!!
There’s a common misconception that you need CliffsNotes, or perhaps a Ph.D. in Carey Mercer, to enjoy a Frog Eyes record. This is because a Frog Eyes record often sounds like a Shaksepearean play on amphetamines, pummeling you at a frenzied pace with wordplay, allusions, and vaguely familiar proper nouns. You might also need a stomach for the macabre: Frontman Mercer often shrieks like someone being burnt at the stake, the soundscapes around him melting into a hallucinatory drip.



It’s true that Mercer’s music is demanding and dense (along with his Swan Lake cohorts Spencer Krug and Dan Bejar, he seems perennially intent on treating the album like an epic poem), but there are also plenty of thrills on the surface. Somewhere in the last Frog Eyes album, Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph, there was a knotty narrative of violence, guilt, and redemption, but– check the soaring, firecracker riffs on “Styled By Dr. Roberts” and “Lear in Love”– it was also a hell of a guitar record. (There’s even something morbid about his choice of gear: Mercer got the guitar tone on that record by using old, dying amps.)
Similarly, Skin of Evil, the second proper record from his solo project, Blackout Beach, was full of luxuriant texture. Even the lyrics themselves possessed a phonetic beauty. Who is Donna, the elusive muse who haunted Skin of Evil? An obscure goddess from a test you failed in high school English? No, Mercer’s said he just likes the way the name sounds– it reminds him of “dawn.” So it is with Fuck Death: a record like any other, best listened to with the search engine browser closed and the encyclopedia left on the shelf. The story’s there should you wish to untangle it, but don’t let it distract you from the luminous atmosphere and synth experiments whose rewards lie much closer to the surface.
“Did you ever think of yourself as a runaway?” Mercer murmured on an unusually hushed moment of Frog Eyes’ clanging, 2007 opus Tears of the Valedictorian. Throughout his career, he’s been preoccupied with themes of masculinity, cowardice, and destiny. How fast must a man run to outpace his own fate? Or, perhaps a better question, one he probably should have asked before he started running: Where can he go? Set during wartime, Fuck Death takes inspiration from soldiers’ desertion to probe these dark themes. The pulse of hypnotic opener “Beautiful Burning Desire” beats, “We got to run away/ Run run away/ Going to run away,” while the corroding, industrial tones of “Torchlights Banned”, featuring backing vocals from Frog Eyes keyboardist Megan Boddy, underscore the tenderness and urgency of a letter home: “I’m going to be a while/ I’m in a fortress of flame/…And your love is all I shall stand for/ And I’m standing in the rain.”
Unlike the more recent, guitar-heavy Frog Eyes records, the sound of Fuck Death mostly comes from intricately layered monophonic synths. In the middle of “Beautiful Burning Desire”, they take on the ominous quality of air-raid sirens; on “Torchlights Banned” they are the commanding chop of helicopter blades; and perhaps most effectively, during the narrator’s flight from his camp on “Be Forewarned, the Night Has Come”, they give the impression of searchlights. On paper it probably seems too literal– like avant-garde Foley art– but the tones Mercer employs effectively create an atmosphere of chilly foreboding, and their luminous tones also provide a sonic link to the record’s thematic preoccupation with light and darkness. Mercer generally throws so many ideas at you that you’re left huffing and puffing with barely a moment to process it all, but Fuck Death is the first record of his that feels like a genuine meditation on the themes it explores. Instead of pummeling, it actually awards the listener with moments of pause, making its atmosphere that much more immersive.
Throughout Fuck Death there’s also Mercer’s requisite musings about art and the artist (“You should be ashamed, Philistine,” goes one ironic, spittle-filled taunt) on which you can faintly detect him grappling with his own persona– obstinately refusing to go easy on us, to crack a smile, or to let in some light. It’s this monochromatic darkness that ultimately makes it a less compelling record than his pal Bejar’s 2011 offering Kaputt, and in particular its closing number, the irresistible, cagily autobiographical, 11-minute-roller-skate-jam-on-quaaludes “Bay of Pigs”. “Bay of Pigs” is indulgent and artful, but it’s also breezy and inviting, the kind of song you’d play for those who have previously dismissed Destroyer as being pretentious or an acquired taste in the hope that it might convert them. There are no such songs on Fuck Death, and so the Mercer camps will remain divided. His admirers will find this record beautiful in the strangest places, while his detractors might choose to see its occasional impenetrable gloom as a kind of desertion in itself: In the end, he’s still running from us.