(Soft Abuse)

 www.softabuse.com

Blackout Beach, Carey Mercer's solo project, is nearly as old as Frog Eyes, though less prolific. Both outfits got started in the early 00s, as Mercer's Blue Pine disintegrated. Since then, Frog Eyes has since produced seven albums and flowed into Swan Lake (with Daniel Bejar and Spencer Krug) for two more. Blackout Beach, by contrast, has been confined up until now to one full-length (2004's Light Flows the Putrid Dawn and a single. This is a shame, really, because on the evidence of Skin of Evil Mercer's uncanny intensity burns fiercest when he is by himself, untethered to any sort of time signature, song structure, instrumentation or narrative device.

The disc starts with "Cloud of Evil" a synthetic beat, a wash of tremulous guitar sounds, a monk's chant rising out of the background. Mercer, too, is chanting, mumbling, ranting to himself, in a feverish inner dialogue about magical symbols and priestly rituals. The whole thing is riveting, inscrutable, moving, like an unfamiliar religious ceremony, and it is far less band-like and structured than Mercer's most free-form excursions with Frog Eyes. In fact, this freedom from form makes the album a bit hard to follow, easier to understand in bits than as a whole. The common elements - guitars that flare and fade in vibrating bursts, half-mad chants, buried rhythms - build atmosphere rather than sense. It is easy to get lost. And yet, if you let yourself go, you will find yourself in strange, rewarding spaces. The out of sync voices of "Three Men Drown in the River" merge in Talk Talk-ish cathedral spaces. The gospel blues of "Nineteen, One God, One Dull Star" morphs into shimmering, heat-baked magic incantations.  

Feral yet literate, hallucinatory yet possessed of an intrinsic kind of logic, Skin of Evil takes listeners through nightmarish, semi-real landscapes. Nothing is exactly what it seems. Everything evokes hidden resonances and unspoken connections. It's exhausting, mystical and ultimately fascinating, speaking to a much greater reality than what's on the surface.

Standout Tracks: "Cloud of Evil," "Nineteen, One God, One Dull Star"  JENNIFER KELLY