Mercy (Dancing for the Death of an Imaginary Enemy), a third studio album from the band Ours, turns out to be a slightly more polished continuation of the band’s previous two albums. With Mercy, lead singer and songwriter Jimmy Gnecco seems more confident in this album’s capability to send and uphold the messages he has been trying to get across all along. Embracing individualism. Discovering life is not quite what you thought, but will be okay anyways. It is possible to be lonely in the middle of a crowd. Just a few of the morsels of wisdom Gnecco wants to share with you.
Released this April on Columbia Records and produced by big wig recording star Rick Rubin (credit albums by Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to his name), Mercy stays on par with Ours’ existing catalogue of music—both lyrically and in composition—likely due to most of the songs having been written around the same time in the early-mid nineties. There has been no grand Ours revolution here, just fine-tuning wrapped up in a shiny new production package.
Other than an undeniably heavy U2 influence on the track "The Worst Things Beautiful," Gnecco and Ours have shed any hangups of deliberately altering songs not to sound like certain influences (which include the usual suspects of Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, and U2), and have produced music that just "feels right" to them. The result, I think, has suited the music well.
Folks with a taste for more brooding, melancholy, head-on confrontations with flaws in the human condition should consider picking this album up to cure a little bit of what ails you. And folks already fans of Ours can count on an album that sounds a little more like…well, like Ours.
Although the music may conjure apocalyptic images of doom and despair simply by the gut-wrenching, forlorn wails of Gnecco, traces of hope are still evident in the lyrics. In “The Worst Things Beautiful,” he sings:
"I'll wake every moment, wake with the sun
Were the worst things always the first things to come?
Find a way to move on and a way to be strong
Cause some things do change, well some things come and
Make the worst things beautiful"
In an interview with Erin Broadley, Gnecco professed that the messages he hopes to send through the vessel of song are the ultimate reason for continuing to release albums and perform. He wants his message to emanate from and transcend the music. More importantly, he wants you to hear it.
“Music helps me and if I can do that for anyone else, then I want to do it,” Gnecco explains to Broadley, “As soon as it feels like nobody’s interested in really hearing it, then I’ll go away and play it for myself in my room.”
Ours are a couple weeks into their summer tour promoting the new album and are scheduled to keep doing so into the first week of August. Look up tour dates and more info at http://www.ours.net and http://www.myspace.com/oursmusic.
