It's the way an old house groans in the early hours of a damp, gray morning. It's the way the steps creak under the murderer's feet. It's the whispered admonishments of a senile old man in the hours before it all happened, and the conspiratorial incantations of a fundamentalist warrior on the eve of his suicide. It's the sobbing of a lost child in a fairy tale forest, the chant of a Medieval monk in his cloisters, the wail of a Middle Eastern call to prayer. It's the scribbly chaos in the mind of a traumatized teen, and the scribbly warnings they found in his journal the next day. But ultimately, it's a scream so reckless and real, so unhinged and so ungrounded that it couldn't possibly be (please please please let it be) just a movie overheard from the next room. It's a scream that erupts with boiling hot blood.

It's the voice of singer-songwriter Jimmy Gnecco, the driving force behind the New York gothic rock quintet known as Ours, and it's the band's strongest, most distinctive, most essential attribute. Ironically, with the inevitable (and not-at-all-off-the-mark) comparisons to Jeff Buckley and Thom Yorke it inspires, that voice has also proven to be the band's most nagging liability even as the sound the band concocted on its first two albums (Distorted Lullabies, 2001 and Precious, 2002) - a swirling, velvety-thick, symphonic cauldron of jagged, anglophile guitar riffs, eastern rhythmic undertow, glammy diva attitude and manic sandwich-board soothsay - offered a refreshingly lush, operatic alternative to the angstily adolescent nu-metal (read: Linkin Park, Papa Roach) it was competing with.

After a six year absence, Ours, under the guidance of producer Rick Rubin, revives that sound in typically grand fashion, while throwing in more than a dash of politically charged venom, on their recently released third album Mercy... Dancing for the Death of an Imaginary Enemy, a sprawling sonic tarpit, black, viscous, fascinating, forbidding, seemingly endless and largely inescapable, even at moments when Gnecco is clearly overplaying his hand - like the long spoken-word interlude in the heart of the song "Black" in which Gnecco sneers "I'm your n*gger you built with fear" to some unspecified other. But at their best, the band create mountainous soundscapes, long brooding shadows full of disquieting lyrical abstractions, dwelt upon and repeated with pointed variations like vicious spells and curses - we didn't know, we didn't know, we want love, we want love.

Gnecco immediately sets the stage for the record on the opening title track, where after a hushed instrumental simmer, he unleashes a horrific wail on a stanza about a suicidal young man, then backing off to a mumbled chant, then wailing, then chanting, heightening the song's urgency in steps and turbulent layers before the song finally collapses back into the long, slow simmer it arose from. With syncopated handclaps, a quietly discordant Spanish guitar, squealing mariachi trumpets, "Murder" mines a deep Meditteranean groove to thrillingly exotic effect; and then, oozily morphs itself into the gorgeously meditative, string-laden ballad "God Only Wants You" which features one of Gnecco's most haunted, most restrained and, it must be said, most Yorke-ish vocal performances.

Despite the album's daunting just-shy-of-an-hour running time, the album starts building an emotional, cathartic momentum on these middle tracks which only gets heightened on songs like "Live Again" (the album's best screamer), "Willing" (the album's most straightforward rocker), and the soaring, nakedly hopeful "Saint", a song whose almost religious epiphanies - I feel like I'm living, I feel like a baby, I feel everything for the first time in my life - lend the album's heart of darkness a more credible depth and humanity. Though it takes a while to find it's true footing, this tense, effortful, and often overwrought record ultimately proves viscerally moving in spite of all of its various excesses. Mercy... is precisely the record that should finally establish conclusively the worthiness of this songwriter and this band, apt comparisons be damned.

- - - - -
BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

"Mercy... Dancing for the Death of an Imaginary Enemy" by Ours
American Records
Released 3/18/08

Produced by Rick Rubin & Jimmy Gnecco
59 min.

SONGS: Mercy - The Worst Things Beautiful - Ran Away to Tell the World - Black - Moth - Murder - God Only Wants You - Live Again - Willing - Saint - Lost - Get Up

Recommended: Yes