[Excerpt from "The Foosball Diaries," Mark Richard-San's journal]

Early Winter, 1998:

I awoke in a pool of mild chemical reaction, sick and alone. Sitting on my chest was the new Jim Carroll release, which I was supposed to have reviewed several weeks ago. Fuck it. I tossed it aside and propped myself up in the filthy apartment window, watching the kids shooting hoops in the playground below. I lit a cigarette and threw Pools of Mercury into the disc player.

Jim's Noo Yawk accent still reminds me of a teenaged Elmer Fudd hustling for junk money at 53rd and 3rd; there's just no getting around the the thick eccentricities of his diction. The album, his first in 15 years, alternates between ambient- backed spoken word pieces (some old, some new) and regular old rockers in which Jim sings.

The kids continue to run ball below. Someday, all of these children will die, before their time probably. The great atomic mother will descend from the skies and swallow them all into her dishrag womb. But they are ignorant of this inevitability, and concentrate on getting that worn, smooth ball into the bottom of the rusted chain net.

Yes, the spoken word pieces are beautifully written, but they sounded better to me when I heard them live a few years back, with Carroll reading alone. The backing music, while generally well done, gives the poems an air of false drama, and the results can be unintentionally comic. Too much flange and reverb on Carroll's voice kills a couple of tracks completely. Still, it's nice to hear the beautiful "Eight Fragments for Kurt Cobain" preserved on record.

The uptempo tracks are generally by- the- numbers alternative rock, with Carroll's unique voice and always interesting lyrical angle providing the only real tension. His singing has never been great, but he's always gotten around that with his superb phrasing, still in evidence here. If anything, his pipes have improved since the Catholic Boy days, and his feel for melody seems more sophisticatd. But the lackluster backing will strike most as boring. In the end, Pools of Mercury merely qualifies as "okay." Carroll's books are what he'll be remembered for.

-Mark Richard-San

"My Ruins"

[Real Audio Stream]