"I remember Donna as she was 3 months ago, and most faces get lost in the haze"

Purcell’s “Dido & Aeneas” at Sadlers Wells Theatre in London, 2007

Over at Last Plane to Jakarta, John Darnielle is saying that Blackout Beach's (solo project of Frog Eyes frontman Carey Mercer) Skin of Evil (does it get its name from the Star Trek episode? I would not be surprised!) is quite possibly the album of the year, at least so far (I've got high hopes for Sunset Rubdown's upcoming Dragonslayer, but I'd feel bad naming it the best album of the year considering that Random Spirit Lover was probably the best or second-best album of 2007). And I've been listening to this enigmatic, 30-minute bottle of smoke since it came out and I could not agree more.

First, to give a feel for the album's sound, Darnielle is right when he says that there is nothing that sounds quite like it: Mercer's usual flair for theatrical wailing and clattering is transformed here into a subtle, brooding, shifting work. It's still unsettling and off-putting, but in a dreadful, ominous way: it's the wailing of a single ghost in a haunted house, rather than the discordant shanty of a whole ship of the dead. Unlike his last solo effort though, the mostly uninteresting Light Flows the Putrid Dawn, Skin of Evil doesn't feel overly simplified or incomplete; Skin of Evil has an incredible number of layers, full of whispers, gentle hums, subdued keening, and Mercer's unmistakable wail loses none of its desperation when he quiets down.

And while there may be nothing else that sounds like it, here are five songs it instantly calls to mind, forming a pretty impressive pedigree of vaporous gloom:

1. David Bowie's "Always Crashing in the Same Car"
2. The Cure's "Plainsong"
3. Joy Division's "Day Of the Lords"
4. The Talking Heads' "Born Under Punches"
5. Echo and the Bunnymen's "All My Colours"

The lyrics, however, not only stand comparison by beg it. Mercer draws on a huge array of classical archetypes to paint a fractured, multi-viewer portrait of the imaginary Donna, a woman loved and feared and worshipped by the "soft men" who tell us their stories throughout the album. Donna is (in chronological order) Eve, Helen, Dido, Dante's Beatrice, Don Quixote's Desdamona, Shostakovich's Elena. And Mercer's lyrics can do "her" (for it is clear that Donna is not merely one woman, but all women worshipped by man, and so perhaps Desdamona is the best example, in that The essential point is that without seeing her [beauty] you must believe, confess, swear, and defend it,” as Quixote told his vanquished foes): "Donna takes her name from the beauty of the wintertime: the candied crust of the snow," he sings in the last song. Mercer, however, seems distinct from the narrators: he views both Donna and her pursuers with pity, feeling that, deep down, "the men just wanted to lay, just fall around the other and sift through the last dusty specks of the day. But," he says, knowing that his art depends on their striving towards a woman who would rather be alone, "I am evil, so I ordered them on! Company halt! I see Donna! I see her away!"



But the album is not Donna's portrait (nor is the woman on its cover, though the artwork is all manner of beautiful)-- we only once see her, as herself: on the shore of a cape town in winter, "huddled and wet and holding some cracked tape; it only played two songs." But neither Donna nor the narrator can discard the tape. This is the core of Mercer's album, of the recursive music that circles like a building funnel cloud around Donna herself, of the moans and woes of the men who haunt her; at it's base, it's about obsession and worship.

And, as the best damn music I've heard this year, it should inspire some of its own.

Give it a listen.

A Tale of the Black Freighter

"Pirate Jenny" is, like a vast array of other oft-covered songs ("Mack the Knife," "September Song," and "Alabama Song," among others), the work of German composer/songwriter Kurt Weill. And, like "Mack the Knife," it was written for his collaboration with postmodern playwright Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper)-- the barmaid Polly Peachum (no one knows why Polly- rather than the actual Jenny herself) is asked by the crew of thieves and thugs at her wedding reception to sing them a song, so she delivers a merry tune about murdering them all and razing the town.

Pretty standard stuff for Brecht, honestly, and only slightly darker than the usual Weill fare.

What many, many people miss in their versions of "Pirate Jenny," as with a great deal of Weill's work (God bless you Bobby Darin, but Macheath is supposed to be a figure of irredeemible evil), is the seething emotional intensity that's supposed to be in it. Polly is a trod-upon figure: the daughter of a beggar-king, married in a stable to a murderer and rapist, competing romantically with a whore. Couple that with Brecht's hardcore communism and the fact that the "Beggar's Opera" is a seething attack on the crimes of all classes, and you can picture the boiling resentment that finally comes to a head in Polly's only solo song in the play.

This is where Nina Simone, one of the greatest female black singers in history (and I would say the greatest, except that Billy has such incredible inertia behind her reputation), comes in with fists swinging. After all, it's not as though Bobby Darin knew oppression or poverty firsthand. But "Pirate Jenny" seems to be a song tailor-made for, if not civil rights, then at least the angry masses. And whereas Brecht's original lyrics were written to resonate with the German underclass (which, in 1928, was pretty angry without his help), Simone makes no bones as to whom she speaks: there are only two major changes her version makes from the most common English translation (please, anyone but Blitzstein, Blitzstein who translated "Pimp's Ballad" as "Memories Tango").

One is from "and you'll see me dressed in tatters in this ratty old hotel"to "in this crummy Southern town in this crummy old hotel," which does a huge amount to cement Simone's version as being sung, if not by her, then by someone of her background. The other, while more subtle, packs an even stronger punch. Whereas the original German is simply "There's a ship in the harbor," Simone changes it to "there's a ship: the black freighter," bellowing out the line with what is quite possibly the voice of God; if you don't get a little shiver, then I as your friend take it as a responsibility to save you from the shambolic state of undeath you must be in. Sung by a black woman, in 1964, on the same album that included "Mississippi Goddam" there is little room for imagination as to what the freighter represents to Simone's narrator: we will come, we will destroy those who held us down, and I will be our queen.

It's not all power politics in Simone's version though. Besides all that murderin' and pillagin,' there's a really strong sexual element that gets missed (although the '97 Donmar Warehouse recording of the play nails that hard, nails it like the play was Mack and the sexual element was any woman with a pulse). Simone taps into the sadism and the urge for power that is such a huge part of Polly's character. In the second-to-last verse, Simone trades her brimstone bellow for a nearly-orgasmic moan, following up her pleading, whimpering in the quiet of death with the incredibly tense, gasping right. now. To play the song straight would be ludicrous-- it's Brecht, the man who defined his style around "the distancing effect"--and Simone taps into its inherent cruelty, viciousness, and the power fantasy contained within it. It's nuanced, it's absolutely chilling, and it's one of Simone's absolute best performances. Just listen to it.



(The art at left certainly isn't conicidental-- Alan Moore admits that the Black Freighter story thread in Watchmen was inspired by Weill and Brecht's song, especially Simone's version).

Dang dogg but if it ain't been a long time

I ain't updated this bliggety-blog in a solid year and some but I've had some major urge to do some public writing (which is like public sex except more acceptable and there isn't some creepity-ass Serbian guy filming it) and I already had this domain up.

So first a real quick music round-up:

This has been one of my favorite videos for pretty much ever and stands as a good testament to why, exactly, John Darnielle commands a following only slightly less devoted than Haile Selassie (although waaaaay whiter).

Found this tune on Amazon earlier today, and it's definitely worth checking out. Very much in the Dresden Dolls / World/Inferno Friendship Society vein (though not as awesome as the latter), with a bit of that Tilly and the Wall Four-girls-shouting-in-unison sound. And it's free which, let's face it, should be the case with all absinthe-soaked cabaret guttersnapes.

And I'm just gonna put Shipping Up to Boston here because any day that doesn't include that isn't a real day.


Also, Pat Robertson is HELLA dumb. Ignoring the subtext of his statement-- that violently attacking someone who has deviant desires, whether they act on them or not, is somehow okay--you ever read much about a duck's genitals? To summarize Miriam Goldstein via Not David Attenbrough, "oh, EW! Ew ew ew ew ew ew. BARF!" This opinion...is BULLshit.

So that's it for now, but I'ma try to keep this regular for a while.