The past three years have brought a great deal of grief and uncertainty into Carey Mercer's life and music, but these days, the singer and songwriter's demeanor possesses a kind of aloof geniality. In concert, he seems just as content to talk and joke as play, like a charismatic acquaintance regaling you with stories at slightly uncomfortable length. In the muted and gently loping songs on his band Frog Eyes' latest LP, Pickpocket's Locket, too, Mercer playfully mulls over a couple of musical ideas rather than pushing past them quickly or distending them quickly into cracked-mirror reflections of themselves. The approach would have been quite different just a few years ago. The tremulous, haunted tenor of the early 2000s—or for that matter, the percussive, histrionic assaults of 2004's The Folded Palm, or the breathy, epic-poetic narration of Tears of the Valedictorian and *Paul's Tomb: A Triumph—*is a far cry from the more polite and conversational parlance of this album.
Pickpocket's Locket’s finds Frog Eyes sounding almost muzzled: The drums are hit with brushes and felt-tipped mallets, the guitars and bass are often acoustic, and a lot of the prime sonic real estate is taken up by bright piano chording and string arrangements from Mercer's erstwhile bandmate and former roommate —Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, and Moonface. Mercer’s vocal is dry and up front, speaking colloquially, and just from the padded studio room instead of from a mountaintop created by delay or cathedral-like reverb. Despite the record's deliberate transparency of production style, though, the musical structures are as hard to parse as they have ever been; the high dramatics and longform organization of earlier, heavier records feels more intuitive, while it can be pretty difficult to determine where verses and chorus begin and end here.
This element of the album points to why—despite his close association with consummate "songwriter" types Dan Bejar and Krug —Mercer's work calls for a different mode of listening, more like one would use with avant-garde music. Its surface-level structural complexity can add up to a net overarching simplicity, if one hears it first as an inchoate whole before worrying about picking it apart. Eventually, the important musical phrases distinguish themselves; in Mercer's case, in any song, a few distinguishing paeans create signposts. "Death Ship"s dense, "Thunder Road"-paced libretto is filled with sneered, ear-catching lines like "I floated to the New York on the back of a log" and "A man shot in the hand from indiscreet fire" which serve as organizational dividers. The ecstatic closer "Rip Down the Fences That Fence the Garden" is built around several belted and bright melodic phrases—"In the dawn, by the river I shall swaddle my wrath!" The goal in these lyrics is preserving attractive sibilance and meter at least as much as cosmic suggestion. Still, there are powerful shadows of meaning. Pecking at the edges of Mercer's neo-Modernist poetry are images of seediness and criminality— political corruption ("Crystal Blip"), lechery ("Two Girls"), and betrayal ("Rejoinders in a Storm"). But even the darkest moments feel perversely comic; the album lacks, certainly, the staring-into-the-abyss ruminations on mortality and human cruelty of previous releases.
In these clearer sections, Pickpocket's Locket proves itself to be increasingly rewarding upon repeated listens, but it still fails to deliver anything particularly remarkable. All of its component gestures can be found on other Mercer projects. The restrained sound palette resembles parts of FE's Carey's Cold Spring, the poppier moments recall Mercer's contributions to Swan Lake, and heavy piano work also anchors excellent Frog Eyes records Valedictorian and 2003’s The Golden River. The main distinguishing feature here is Krug’s string arrangements, but disappointingly, these can feel childishly simple and precious in the same, borderline irritating way as the heavy counterpoint in Krug's own solo work—see the layered, scalar instrumental melodies on Sunset Rubdown’s last two albums, in particular. At their best, Krug's charts here lend Mercer's more modest songs a baroque quality, reminiscent of the modest string work on records like John Cale's Paris 1919 or Robert Wyatt's Shleep (see, in particular, the effective, wry figures in "The Beat Is Down").
Mercer has long been someone worth keeping up with in indie rock; his voice has, since his early recording, been commanding, immutable, and seemingly impervious to trends. Fans have grown with the subtle changes in his mode of attack, and given the specificity of his style, sometimes it's easy to overlook the significant ways his approach has drifted since his formative releases. It's startling to realize Pickpocket’s Locket is the odd Carey Mercer release you can almost mellow out to. Once you delve deeper than the pleasant aesthetic, however, it's hard not to wish for a few more distinguishing moments to hold onto.
