*** The Gothic Archies

THE NEW DESPAIR

(Merge)

The songs Stephin Merritt writes for the Magnetic Fields can be depressing, but they've got nothing on the Gothic Archies, where Merritt pins the nihilism meter's needle all the way to the right. "Goth-bubblegum," he calls it -- which entails, for instance, coming up with a mindbendingly chirpy melody, giving it lyrics like "ride the magic hearse to the city of the damned," and drenching it in Bauhausian reverb. As you might expect, this brief EP, The New Despair, is kind of hilarious -- "The world's a leech crawling down one's throat," Merritt intones in "The Tiny Goat," and that perfectly dry "one's" makes the song. But behind the giggles and gloom and the chintzy synth instrumentation, the lyrics hint at actual horror: soul-crushing loneliness and loss of hope. It's real despair wearing a Halloween mask of Munch's Scream.

-- Douglas Wolk