Release Date: November 15th, 2011
If Blackout Beach’s goal on Fuck Death was to capture the essence of some sort of sonic schizophrenia, it has succeeded. Actually, Blackout Beach is really one guy, Carey Mercer of Frog Eyes and Swan Lake, so the fact that the sands of this beach are blowing all over the musical map—and moreover that the map in question seems to be glued in his atlas upside down (and possibly backward, too)—is even more remarkable.
Named after a painting by American artist Leon Golub, Mercer describes Fuck Death as an attempt to make something about Beauty and War, although he’s upfront about indicating that he has “very little experience with these concepts.”
He begins by channeling Bon Iver’s ambience and the quiet reserve of those Foxes Fleet of foot, digresses into a Nick Cave and finds carcasses of dead Swans, and that’s all on the first piece, “Beautiful Burning Desire.” He launches into “Torchlights Banned” like a post-industrial Iggy Pop, carving up his chest with shards of static and engaging frequent female guest vocalist Megan Boddy as his Kate Pierson-like foil. In short, it sounds like he’s doing a goth take on Pop’s “Wild Child,” deconstructing it to the point of killing the joke.
Fuck Death is a journey down the darkest and most lost of all highways, a road to nowhere hurtling toward an infinite void. “Like a thief in the night, I shall dream of the void,” he sings on the brief acoustic interlude of “Deserter’s Song,” which serves as a welcome respite from the sonic onslaught of the first two tracks. It also provides a nice bridge to the pulsing electronic keyboard blasts and dark contemplations of conflict in “Be Forewarned, the Night Has Come.” “And the snake has come into bed with your arms,” he sings repeatedly here, as background “aah”s and sentinel trumpet blasts fade into the background.
On his label’s website, Mercer identifies a few of the influences and inspirations that contributed to Fuck Death, including:
“The Book of Job; Michael Herr’s Dispatches; this Russian film called Come and See; ’80s Vietnam films employing ’60s guitar sounds to sweep us back into that era; the awesomeness of Platoon to the 10-year old mind; Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; Kraftwerk; Fuzz; Brownface Princeton tremolo; Wind sounds; Cosmic Sounds; Death Sounds; Archilochus’ fragments; Iraq; Cheerleaders; Chinese soldier poems, and Shawn MacDonald’s mountain photos, cloud-and-sky-and-stone images that I returned to many times while constructing the record.”
Given the chaotic influences and despite the pop inclinations of a few of his musical cousins, it should come as no surprise that this record is not an easy listen. Far from it, in fact—aside from the aforementioned tracks, the 12-minute-plus opus “Drowning Pigs” could easily lose a lot of listeners. However, there’s enough going on in the composition and recording to thoroughly engage and retain one’s ears throughout—with the caveat that headphones are highly recommended. If there’s a criticism to be made of Fuck Death, it’s that Mercer seems to take himself (and the world) way too seriously, but that’s most likely hard to avoid when your stated goal is to make an album “about beauty and death.” Then again, it’s a lot more listenable than Destroyer’s jokey recent release, in addition to being more coherent and artistically worthwhile.
Another imperfection is the track length and overall length of the record, especially given that Fuck Death took three years to record. The concluding cut, “Sending Postcards to a Ghost,” seems to just end halfway through, and that underscores another issue. At just more than 37 minutes, it seems like Mercer could have spaced out his ideas a bit, rather than providing a barrage of sounds and lyrical concepts in such a highly concentrated fashion. Still, given that he recorded everything himself using three synthesizers (two mono, one poly), two drum machines and one guitar amplifier, the record is an impressive accomplishment and comes close to accomplishing his admittedly lofty goals.
Blackout Beach – Fuck Death tracklist:
- “Beautiful Burning Desire”
- “Torchlight’s Banned”
- “Deserter’s Song”
- “Be Forewarned, the Night Has Come”
- “Hornet’s Fury into the Bandit’s Mouth”
- “Drowning Pigs”
- “Broken Braying Sound of the Donkey’s Cry”
- “Sending Postcards to a Ghost”
