3.5
Pressing play on Carey Mercer’s second solo album Skin of Evil feels almost shamefully invasive, like stumbling upon something you weren’t meant to witness. It’s a dirty, shivering comedown from Mercer’s work with his band Frog Eyes ‘mdash; still gothic but more desperate and scattered, a collage of riffs stolen from blues and baroque pop to noise, whirled into sensational chaos.
It opens with a pulsating, trance-inducing beat that ebbs and rises throughout the album, reappearing erratically and without warning. Each impulsive track is virtually indistinguishable from the last, as Mercer never quite reveals where one ends and the next begins.
It’s not that Skin of Evil is repetitive; its compositions are simply unconstrained by numbers. The album lets us forget its identity as a collection of recordings and becomes nothing more than a mood, a glimpse of experience to which Mercer is allowing us privvy. His work could be classified as experimental or conceptual, but that wouldn’t do justice to the album’s complete departure from familiar compositional techniques. Its hallucinogenic, echoing guitars sweep in and out, reaching crescendo before slipping away, coming back to life in the form of Mercer’s haunting voice. He comes to us from somewhere far away, eerie cries building to deep wailing. Like a phantom wanderer wearing the haggard scars of a man long imprisoned, he bemoans a life misled and deeds better left undone. At times, lyrics froth over into the stormy, nonsensical mutterings of a schizophrenic plotting murder.
Without his bandmates to counsel him, Skin of Evil finds Mercer pervaded by a heavy sadness; voices and their echoes and uncertain beats swirl into a painful and troubled density that only its creator could understand. For the rest of us, though, that isolation proves arresting, captivating and remarkably unresolved.