Blackout Beach
Skin of Evil

A kick drum and a cymbal keeping time with all the enthusiasm of a postal worker on a Friday afternoon, a guitar that sounds like it’s coming from another dimension—so distant and reverberated it’s more like the sound of a mirage—and finally a voice that doesn’t so much sing as it delivers a prophecy, somewhere between a lament and a threat. This isn’t music, it’s a scene. A nightmare in slow motion. A sonic desert where Blackout Beach stage their own personal post-apocalyptic medicine show, and at center stage stands the man himself: the charlatan with the broken voice, Carey Mercer, ready to sell us his miracle potion—likely made of rust, ash, and cheap bourbon.

His voice—which could be described as a kind of vocal possession with dramatic tendencies—can captivate you like a midnight sermon in an abandoned church, or push you away with the brute force of a door slammed in your face during a Mojave storm. He proclaims, admonishes, despairs, and does so with such exaggerated theatricality that even Klaus Kinski, somewhere, might raise an eyebrow.

"Skin of Evil" isn’t a record that takes you by the hand, that drives you to the beach with the top down and sunglasses on. No, this album throws you into the dust, makes you trip over horse skeletons and rusted wreckage.
It’s a hallucinatory gothic western, where the hero is an anti-hero who’s read too much McCarthy and listened to sermons on amphetamines.

Sure, all this can be fascinating too. The America evoked here is mythological and diseased, as distant as it is familiar: a territory where the melancholy of Edgar Lee Masters, the desperate epic of Cormac McCarthy, and a ragged echo of Nick Cave at his most theatrical all coexist—but without the luxury of an orchestra.

Don’t expect lightness, nor “good vibes.” This is a record that you suffer through, that you digest slowly—and maybe not at all. But if you let yourself be swept away by its flayed poetry, by its lyrical yet not sterile cynicism, you might even enjoy it. Maybe not today, not tomorrow, but some winter’s day, when all around you is gray and the only possible color is the brown of mud and tobacco.

And who knows, perhaps at that very moment, it might even feel like a caress. A rough caress, with split knuckles and alcoholic breath.