Listening Between the Lines

Photo courtesy Shawn Macdonald/Dead Oceans

There are whole subsets of music dedicated to reassurance and personal motivation. There is gospel music, obviously, and plenty of secular FM-radio power ballads in pop, country, and R&B—what used to be called “MOR,” or “middle of the road.” But that’s not generally what you expect from the likes of the Victoria, B.C., band Frog Eyes.

The group has been led for more than a decade by Carey Mercer, the lesser-known player in the west-coast Canadian cabal of stubborn-oddball art-rockers that also includes his sometime collaborators Dan Bejar (Destroyer, the New Pornographers) and Spencer Krug (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Moonface). In the course of his 13 releases with Frog Eyes and his other main project Blackout Beach, nearly every one better than the one before, Mercer’s perpetrated song titles such as “Time Destroys Its Plan at the Reactionary Table” or “Caravan Breakers, They Prey on the Weak and the Old,” and ambitious conceits such as a mini-opera about misogynist violence, Paul’s Tomb: A Triumph. His work is unabashedly intellectual but wildly dynamic, socially conscious and yet painterly and abstract, and not given to easy homilies.

Younger artists make demands, but older ones make offerings. They opt for humility over humiliation.

But on the extraordinary new Frog Eyes album, Carey’s Cold Spring, Mercer’s usual ambience of outsize characters, landscapes, verbal outbursts, and torrential guitar and drums is peppered with encouraging words: Don’t, don’t, don’t give up your dreams. Reform for the light. I know that the soul shall rise like a burning shade of light. Your shame shall fall away, all shame shall fall away. Is this love that you’re missing? The world is sick, the world is sad, but what you gonna do—you gotta try to make glad. And nobody shall die, and nobody shall die.

What is up here? A religious conversion? No, nothing so extreme, just the everyday emergencies that erupt and affect everyone—the sorts of forces that seem to cause most adventurous artists, whether they begin in exuberance, sullenness, or defiance, to arc over time toward consolation. Think of the Beatles moving from “Money” to “Here Comes the Sun,” or John Ashbery from the pinging disordered referents of “The Tennis Court Oath” to more elegiac recent poems such as “The New Higher”, or even the progress of a creator as unsettling as Louise Bourgeois between 1974’s “Destruction of the Father” and 1999’s brittle but sheltering “Maman.”

It’s how life goes: The febrile atmosphere of self-definition becomes clouded with happenstance and misted with regret, and all too soon chilled by draughts approaching from the graveyard. Confrontation begins to matter less than reconciliation, which if you’re lucky you won’t take as a defeat. Younger artists make demands, but older ones make offerings. They opt for humility over humiliation, or else they’re prone to curdle into crankdom. (Though that also can have its appeal.)

Artists in the heat of fame sometimes take those turns too fast: Despite its dance-floor flair, Katy Perry’s new album Prism, for example, comes across emotionally as more like Céline Dion than the new Céline Dion album promises to be. At 28, the “Teenage Dream” singer has gone from shooting fireworks out of her bra to beseeching “the grace of God” in the space of one album, clutching at the old pop pledge that it’s gonna be alright in the wake of the mundane trauma of divorce. Or so her audience presumes, at least, given what’s known about her life outside the frame.

And that’s the sticky bit: We listeners use what we’ve gleaned from reportage or rumor to read these narratives into what we hear. A singer who dies young seems in retrospect to have been foreshadowing in every lyric. If it’s been publicized that an artist is in love, freshly married, or a new parent, has broken up with spouse or band or has had a heart attack, is in mourning or is reaching old age—each of these conditions creates an expectation. The question is whether that’s a threat to the creative process, or an opportunity.

You can see the rationale for going into Pynchon-like reclusion, to keep your private life and your art out of one another’s way. On the other hand, perhaps openness with your audience might foster an exchange that gives back more than it sacrifices. That’s the gamble that Carey Mercer has taken, from the title of his album down, with Carey’s Cold Spring. When he posted preview tracks to the music-sharing site Bandcamp last month, he disclosed that it was recorded while his father was dying of cancer, and that shortly after it was finished he was diagnosed with throat cancer himself.

Mercer quickly added that his is “the kind of cancer you fight,” not a death sentence. He then posed for himself the obvious question: Given that he is hardly the celebrity-gossip type—much more an Ashbery than a Katy Perry—why divulge this information and risk cluttering the view of the work? “I suppose,” he wrote, “that, after a decade of making music for what feels like a fairly committed and interested group of listeners, I have grown close to the abstract idea of you, the listener. Therefore: I think it right to share what was going on.”

I think he was also nudging those listeners to a certain approach to this album: to bear in mind that he didn’t know what was going to befall him when he recorded this music, but that it had turned out to be right for the occasion—as if the songs themselves had intuited they would be called upon for consolation, and stood at the ready. Mercer went on to publish a more thorough and moving account of his illness last week, and there again he dealt with that notion of artistic precognition, in a darker sense: He’d come to suspect he had cursed himself by titling a previous record Fuck Death, that he’d taunted the Reaper and was paying the price.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2013/10/carey_s_cold_spring_by_frog_eyes_carey_mercer_reviewed.html
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