"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.