Carey Mercer is the lead singer of Frog Eyes, who release their new (and immensely beautiful) record today. It's called Paul's Tomb: A Triumph and it's currently my favourite release of the year. I wrote about Flower In A Glove, and now Lear in Love is also available to sample.

Carey Mercer is the lead singer of Frog Eyes, a band so special to me I lack the words to convince you. So I will let his words convince you.
Today, a poem from Carey Mercer.

Kraftwerk - "Radioaktivität"
Charles Mingus - "Flowers for a Lady"

Nuclear bombs do not annihilate the earth,
they destroy cities.  The destruction of a city
is just

Horrible.

All of our popular imagination on the subject
shows not the destruction of a filthy, mud-covered
unpaved Main Street,
Animal feed stores and the only Dairy Queen
In mock-supplication before the Sun's malevolent prince:
No, 
Not that,

But the instantaneous de-constitution 
of the imperial and seemingly indestructible
blocks of granite and marble of the grand Carnegie libraries,
the sophisticate's refuge: the arch-venerable first edition
book store, 

Folios made of willow
 smelling of branch and yearning for the fire, 
(better the nuclear fire than the pedant's slobbery digits)

The homeless colonies emerge from their day-nocturnes, then
Behold the sun,
Scurry to nowhere
As they have always done anyways

That other well-dressed man has bought Salami and mushroom-infused cheese
from a distant mountain,
and now drops it in fear,

Every secret-unmarked-door that brings country people to its gates
and yields 
a crushing absence of secrets,
buckles in the heat, the paint moves as weeds move in a current and then 
it all moves along

Shit,
Everything--the soft inequality, the hard inequality, the beautiful music that emanates out of sadness, the horn of the bridge, the snare over the ridge,
the soft patter of the cymbal as a kind of insistent
symbol,
Everything gone

It's the city that sinks down into a molten remembrance
this sinking occurs in our secret imagination 
having secretly imagined it and dreamt it so often
from 12 years old to now,
sometimes still turning on the radio and expecting to hear 
dread announcement of
dire static

It is impossible to describe 
not using stock images: 

Nuclear War 
Radioactivity,
Flowers for a Lady

--

For more of Carey's writing, he has an often haunting, often hilarious blog Clouds of Evil

(Previous guest-blogs: White Hinterland, Bear in Heaven, artist Michael Krueger, artist Amber Albrecht, The Whiskers, Silver Jews, artist Ariel Kitch, artist Aaron Sewards, artist Corinne Chaufour, "Jean Baudrillard", artist Danny Zabbal, artist Irina Troitskaya, artist Eleanor Meredith, artist Keith Greiman, artist Matthew Feyld, The Weakerthans, Parenthetical Girls, artist Daria Tessler, Clem Snide, Marcello Carlin, artist Johnnie Cluney, Beirut, Jonathan Lethem, Arcade Fire, Al Kratina, Eugene Mirman, artist Dave Bailey, Agent Simple, artist Keith Andrew Shore, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, artist Kit Malo with Alden Penner (The Unicorns) 1 2, artist Rachell Sumpter, artist Katy Horan 1 2, David Barclay (The Diskettes), artist Drew Heffron, Carl Wilson, artist Tim Moore, Page France, Devin Davis, Okkervil River, Grizzly Bear, Hello Saferide, Damon & Naomi, Brian Michael Roff, producer Howard Bilerman. There are many more to come.)