One of the greatest favors and greatest injuries an artist can give his music is to give it a story before releasing it. It's a habit employed frequently these days, when setting up and talking up context has become increasingly easier to amplify: The secluded cabin. The intense personal trauma. The soul-searching sailboat adventure. On one hand, these narratives create a world around the music, painting a lush backdrop. But sometimes the backstory can be deceiving, a crutch that distorts a work's value. Considering how often we impart our own meanings on the music we love, should it matter at all?
In the case of Carey Mercer's Carey's Cold Spring, the latest album from his frenetic, prolific project Frog Eyes, it's hard to know how his own heartbreaking preview affects how it's heard. Last month, the Victoria, B.C., native announced the record with a letter explaining that (a) this, unlike many of his previous releases, would not be a concept album; (b) his father recently died and he played the record's final track "Claxxon's Lament" for him in hospice as "the last song that went into his ears," subsequently adding the song to the album at the last minute; and (c) no sooner had Mercer finished the record than he was diagnosed with throat cancer, prompting him to self-release the album and postpone touring indefinitely. A few weeks later, the record was dropped on Bandcamp, along with a FAQ. It was an intimate and honest introduction that is now nearly impossible to separate from Cold Spring itself, regardless of how incidental the tragedies might have been to the actual record-making process.
Without those words to contextualize the record, Carey's Cold Spring is probably the most straightforward album Frog Eyes have ever released. Excepting a typically long-winded opener in "The Road Is Long", the album's tracks have settled into surprisingly consistent, manageable lengths. Melanie Campbell's idiosyncratic drumming is absent, replaced by more traditional percussion; songs have recognizable bridges, even lines that pass for choruses. The music is still rife with the imagery and thick, twisty metaphors that have endeared Mercer to critics. Themes like the evils of materialism and war power it; women pepper its landscape like wispy, mythological creatures. (Either he has revived one of the supporting characters from Paul's Tomb: A Triumph opener "A Flower in a Glove", or he knows multiple skittish women named Judith.) "Don't Give Up Your Dreams" is the saccharine ballad; its beginning is its most gripping moment, its closer the most important.
But on Cold Spring, Frog Eyes' carefully crafted fever dreams have been replaced by orderly instrumentals and disordered almost-thoughts. Without Frog Eyes' conceptual concentration, it all becomes slack and rambling, its mumbled poetry less crucial to grasp. It's less inventive, less urgent, almost incidental; Mercer's wild-eyed, commanding sermons have softened, and the only true bombast lies in the album's first 60 seconds. It's an awfully quiet album, especially for one "made over a period of three years" with a mind on "riots, occupy, revolutions, storms, floods, melodramatic gestures, leftist factions, mass marches in the streets, the sheer and shocking crookedness of our political and economic system, fear of the right, fear of torture, of murder, of future firing squads, of the consequences of idealism, of the consequences of having no ideals or ideas."
If you refuse to separate Mercer's life from his art, the record's discontent is eerily weighted by events that came to pass after its recording. On "The Road Is Long," when he sings, "Evil, I want you to know that I know that you have no plans," it feels like a new challenge. And on "Claxxon's Lament", the song that now belongs to the late Mr. Mercer, he repeats "nobody shall die" and it's crushing; even if he wrote it long before he lost him, the heartbreak is fresh and palpable. In his FAQ, Mercer writes that he is "supposed to get better," and has "the kind of cancer you fight." When he returns, Carey's Cold Spring, an album that gazes uncertainly toward an uncertain future, should serve as an appropriate turning point.
