Somewhere in the land of Jon Brion and Fiona Apple lives the new album by San Diego’s Manuok.

Manuok is Scott Mercado, a gentle and sweet player in many of Southern California’s most important independent musical projects (Album Leaf, Mr. Tube, Ilya, Black Heart Procession, Tristeza), and his second album is a composed and voluptuous year-end pleaser entitled No End To Limitations. It’s a patchwork piece, running the gamut of the musical genre spectrum — from dark folk to dark electronics and around the bend to a weird, sadistic happiness in my favorite piece on the album, “You and I.”

By patchwork, I do not mean ragtag or old, or any of the sad and negative associations of the term — I mean kaleidoscope-like and varied. Manuok uses roughly recorded sound bites from an afternoon with Mercado’s Grandpa to sew together this album — a touching bit of history to help set the overall theme of the album. It is a harsh, bashfully introspective journal of Mercado’s day-to-day. As Manuok, Mercado is himself a character. He talks to himself, the girl he loves…he says things that he would not say outside of the song.

He says, “Darling, you’re in my country…” in “Always Losing Things,” as if he is about to smack you. What he says after that is sweet, simple poetry. A lot of these songs flirt with fear, often opening with some sort of threatening or sadistic lyric masked as a soft melody (”don’t you try and stop me now…”) as in “What You Wanted.”

Songwriters like this need people like you to buy their album. Mercado is no folky Jason Mraz or John Mayer with girls falling in front of him at shows and reading into his lyrics in order to find themselves; it takes a listen and a brain to understand this type of creation. He needs you to hear him, and you can hear that need in every piano key he hits as if to say to us that all this giving should not go unnoticed.

Taking off my reviewer hat, I know Manuok. I know Scott Mercado and what he is capable of creating, and No End To Limitations is true to his talent, despite the contrary title. This album is full of idiosyncrasies that only this one person can deliver. I listen to each song on No End and cringe at the honesty of the song-maker; the only limitations I find are perhaps his reach as an independent band lacking the gloss and primping of other, less meaningful acts.

I know, I sound like I am gushing — like I could spend all afternoon praising the work of this one musician. There are songs I skip past.

For example, I prefer to ignore the electronic tracks in favor of a more moody, melodic listen. I am a lover of his melodies — light accordion and twirly guitars make “Serves You Right” a special track for me. Mercado’s voice breaking at the middle, going into a falsetto — head-bobbing and twitching into a Thom Yorke-esque style, this song makes me grin ear to ear, despite its instigating title.

Then there is track 11 — “You and I” — a sarcastic and glib ode to a pair of people Scott says “… are better off in hell…” Every line further into the song gets more and more sarcastically delicious, turning quickly into an alt country swinger about “empty promises and (what sounds to me like…) failed beliefs.”

Be sure to keep an eye out for an upcoming interview with Scott Mercado, and if you’re in the Orange County area, he’s playing the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa.

You should go, and while there, buy this album. Buying CDs is good.

If you can’t make it to Costa Mesa, the album is available for download HERE.

IT’S ONLY TEN DOLLARS!!