Mercury Rev - A Psychedelic Dream

Model students of the so-called neo-psychedelic school, Mercury Rev represent one of the cornerstone experiences of indie-rock over the last two decades. Their music is a knowing, never gratuitous reworking of the past: the most genuine pop (Beatles) and the least abrasive psychedelia (Velvet Underground), certain mannerisms typical of progressive rock and the apocalyptic anxiety of new wave, all skillfully recreated, proving how, in an anti-Platonic twist, the copy can even surpass the original.

If in the first phase of their output it was the delirious, decentered element that prevailed, through complex sonic destructurings carried out under the radar – narcoleptic guitar distortions, an almost unwieldy stratification of sound layers – later on the center of gravity shifted toward a more classic song form, in which, paradoxically, the deconstructionist message (the absence of any single foundation of reality) launched earlier took on even greater weight.

The multivocal nature of their art nonetheless doesn't stop Mercury Rev from maintaining strong cohesion and consistency within their own work, almost as if the unwieldy field of forces they set in motion converged centripetally toward the creative act itself, self-reflexive and for that reason unified.

Mercury Rev formed in the mid-Eighties in Buffalo, New York, though their definitive lineup wouldn't come together until 1989, after a few years' apprenticeship scoring student films and low-budget features. The push to break out of the amateur-film-soundtrack circuit came from composer Tony Conrad himself, who spotted their artistic potential. The band's original lineup included eccentric singer David Baker, guitarist Sean "Grasshopper" Mackiowiak, flautist Suzanne Thorpe, Jimmy Chambers on drums, former Flaming Lips guitarist Jonathan Donahue on guitar and second vocals, and bassist Dave Fridmann, who had already produced and engineered records for the Flaming Lips themselves. And with Wayne Coyne's band, Mercury Rev share a peculiar, eccentric style, made of contrasts and drugged atmospheres, forever oscillating between ecstasy and paranoia, yet never abandoning the colorful suggestions of sixties psychedelia. Their brand of psychedelia set itself apart from that of their English shoegazer contemporaries through a more measured use of the wall of sound: Mercury Rev could rely on noise, but they enriched it with soft, baroque arrangements, moving – sometimes abruptly – from the noisiest feedback to the gentlest psychedelic pop.

For convenience, their career can be split into two phases: the first (1991-1995), marked by a chaotic, deranged psychedelia that revived the trips of 13th Floor Elevators, Pink Floyd and Spacemen 3, marrying them to the American college-rock instincts of Flaming Lips and Yo La Tengo; the second (1998-2005), devoted to rediscovering the baroque pop of the Sixties (Scott Walker, Van Dyke Parks), thanks above all to a heavier use of orchestration and more delicate, dreamlike tones, far removed from the noise of their early days.

The masterpiece of the band's first incarnation was Yerself Is Steam, released in 1991. The album broke free from all the forms of rock music in vogue at the time, rejecting both the compromises of grunge and the dancefloor psychedelia of the Madchester sound, as well as the more ethereal kind found in shoegaze. It is in fact an anarchic record, playing on dissonant guitars and the delicacy of flute and strings in a singular tangle of sounds and atmospheres. Mercury Rev's music feeds on the neuroses of modernity, caught between sulphurous, alienating moods. Immersion in decadence and chaos thus becomes a tool for purification, a kind of "acid ecstasy".

More than songs, the tracks on Yerself Is Steam are exhausting self-analyses. Musically, the blueprint is almost always the same: a lead melody sketched out by simple acoustic guitar chords (or, alternatively, keyboards) that is soon swept away by a devastating cascade of distortion, with percussion and flute ready to take over. To get a more concrete idea, just listen to the chilling "Blue And Black", carried by piano and orchestra and sung by Baker, who seems intent on mangling Scott Walker's baritone with his own drunken, drugged-out voice, before switching register and babbling in the grip of visions, in a style reminiscent of early David Thomas.

Mercury Rev's psychedelia is so insidious that it can trigger a bad trip even with such delicate, soothing arrangements, but it also allows itself moments of pure catharsis, like the tornado of guitars on the epic "Sweet Oddysee Of A Cancer Cell T' Th' Center Of Yer Heart", a symphony of psychedelic rock that builds tension over three minutes of electric charge before exploding into a supernova of howling distortion: it's the band's greatest masterpiece, the purest expression of their mood, torn between lysergic ecstasy and harrowing paranoia. The other high point is the following "Frittering", which starts out as a gorgeous folk ballad for acoustic guitar and filtered voice, only to get sucked into a whirlpool of distortion with an unexpected, poignant solo.

"Chasing A Bee" was released as a single and came with a beautiful video that condenses all the song's delirium into images bordering on trash; "Syringe Mouth", the other more direct track, is a piece of garage-rock with a hugely powerful riff and duets of filtered, screaming voices — the effect is scorching.

The apotheosis of their demented brand of rock comes at the close, with the twelve minutes of "Very Sleepy Rivers", a spectral, harrowing mantra; the guitar repeats a listless melody while Baker, as if gripped by paranoia or monstrous visions, sings a delirious lyric, first slurring it, then screaming it.

The album was a bolt from the blue: few American indie bands knew how to play rock this noisy yet so varied in its meticulous arrangements. Unfortunately, due to record-label mishaps and problems with the tour organizers (linked to Baker's excessive drug use), it didn't achieve the success it deserved, despite enthusiastic reviews.

The 1992 EP Lego My Ego contains alternate and live versions of tracks from the debut, plus their gorgeous first single ("Car Wash Hair") and another previously unreleased track (the experimental "If You Want Me To Stay"). Although a minor work, it's notable for a fourteen-minute version of "Very Sleepy Rivers" — less insidious and more powerful and direct — and for "Coney Island Cyclone", which, rearranged for guitar and flute, sounds even more magical than the version on the debut album.

The wild anarchy of their music returns with Boces (1993), enriched by a greater dose of sweetness and by their refined harmonies taking the upper hand. Often underrated, Boces is far from being a clone of the previous album; it's rather an attempt to express less extreme feelings and give room to their innate pop sensibility. Proof of their growth comes with the march-like "Meth Of A Rockette's Kick", featuring horns, raga touches and sudden yet mild guitar distortion, with a festive flow light years away from the extremism of the debut.

Compared to the debut, Baker's presence is less decisive (except on a few tracks, including the disorienting "Trickle Down"), while Donahue gets the chance to indulge in the poppier numbers of the band's early phase: "Bronx Cheer" and "Hi-Speed Boats", both tremendous examples of psychedelic rock — the former more torrential and thunderous, the latter more shamelessly melodic. "Something For Joey" is the album's masterpiece, a superlative pop miniature with a flute melody over crackling guitars; it could be the perfect textbook example of noise-pop, a lesson in how to blend acid and sugar to craft a masterpiece (the video, too, is yet another audiovisual trip). Another peak is "Downs Are Feminine Ballons", their sweetest, most enchanting song, a kind of relaxed, melancholic take on Spacemen 3, with sinuous guitar-and-flute interplay and angelic vocals.

Links to the past can be found in the delirious blues of "Girlfren'", where all of rock's great drunkards come back to life (from Tom Waits to David Thomas), or in "Snorry Mouth", another of their sweet acid odysseys, with detonating guitars and bursts of feedback.

The contrasts that gave the previous album its strength are pushed to the extreme here, just as the two singers seem determined to stand apart from each other at all costs: Donahue flaunts a sweet, effeminate timbre, while Baker has an unconventional, drugged-out voice on his side.

Although less abrasive than its predecessor, Boces still sounds experimental and daring, combining wildly different styles and delivering tracks that defy convention (like the dub-pop of "Boys Peel Out") alongside memorable melodies.

Despite the softening of their sound and an appearance at Lollapalooza, fame still eludes Mercury Rev, and internal problems within the band lead to the departure of David Baker, by then musically and personally at a great distance from the rest of the group, due to his drug problems and the band's melodic turn. He would go on to release a solo album under the name Shady, leaving Donahue alone on vocals in Mercury Rev, while Adam Snyder joined on electronic keyboards (mellotron, synthesizer, electric piano), tripling those already played by Chambers (clavinet, harpsichord) and Fridmann (piano and mellotron).

The lineup change leads to a growing wealth of arrangements in their sound: in 1995 came See You On The Other Side, attempting a bold shift towards an almost entirely orchestral rock, bridging the gap to the band's baroque phase. All things considered, the album only really matters when viewed within the arc of their creative journey, since truly notable tracks are few compared to previous albums, most of them sounding clumsy and unripe, as if Donahue and co. still couldn't quite control the sheer scale of resources at their disposal. The two standout pieces are "Empire State", a nursery rhyme powered by mighty progressive surges, roaring guitars and a pronounced horn section in the Canterbury style, and "Racing The Tide", which edges close to shoegaze's wall of sound.

The remaining tracks are nothing special, starting with the single "Young Man's Stride", their most punkish track, and "A Kiss From An Old Flame", overloaded with flourishes and baroque excess; far better is the danceable "Close Encounters Of The 3rd Grade".

The impression is that the imaginative arrangements are no longer backed by melodies worthy of the name.

Dating from the same year is Paralyzed Mind Of The Archangel Void, an ambient music experiment released by the band under the pseudonym Harmony Rockets.

In 1998, with Deserter's Songs, Mercury Rev return to their best form. It's a disorienting album, with its grandiloquent orchestration, its belle époque rustlings, its pop perfectly structured, its singing so graceful and old-fashioned. Yet, despite this, what strikes you is the extraordinary relevance of a work that fits perfectly into the postmodern era, enacting a parody of it (the recovery of fragments of the past, recontextualized) and thereby exposing its lack of genuine originality.

The opening, fairy-tale-like and dreamy, is entrusted to the splendid "Holes", in which time seems to dissolve into a golden eternity, made of rivers of fantasy and crooked characters (moles, flies) accompanied by Olympian visions. As the record unfolds, the sense of estrangement grows and sublimates into increasingly witty and fantastical images (the word "dream" recurs often in the lyrics), resting on a shifting musical fabric, now lyrical and dreamlike ("Endlessly"), now extraordinarily well-weighed in melody (the imperious "Opus 40" and "Goddess On A Highway", a fantastic catalyst for placid crystalline visions), now unsettling and gothic-tinged ("Pick Up If You're There", which teaches us how every good fairy tale must also have its wolf), and finally even danceable ("Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp").

The instrumental apparatus is nothing short of grandiose: to the classic rock lineup (guitar, bass, drums, keyboards) are added numerous elements imported from other genres (classical, jazz). Just consider the majesty of the already-mentioned "Holes", which opens with a string arrangement as sunny as it is grandiose and self-satisfied (aided by Thorpe's elegiac pastoral flute), the childlike xylophone of "Tonite It Shows", the turn-of-the-century jazz atmosphere of the instrumental "I Collect Coins", with its production so dirty and antiquated, the string bed of "Opus 40", over which a tender Jonathan Donahue moves, the saxophone paired with Reed-like guitar on the smooth "Hudson Line", the sixties organ of "Pick Up If You're There". Each track also features an extraordinary progression by accumulation, whereby a handful of initial instruments (strings, a flute, a bass) are joined by numerous others, thanks to wonderful openings of sound (as if at the end of a narrow alley an immense clearing suddenly appeared), enveloping the listener in their baroque magic. The differences in the arrangements are notable, aimed at evoking the past (hiss and grime) while situating it in the present (a crystalline sonic fabric) and at expanding space (a wealth of ingredients placed within an epic, cinematic scenario), testament to a music with neither time nor borders.

The title of the work also evokes the asceticism of the anchorite tradition, recalling the gesture by which, in the early Middle Ages, monks withdrew in solitude into the desert, leading a secluded life guided by a misanthropic love of God. An image that perfectly suits the rapture the listener experiences with Deserter's Songs: an imaginary escape (and therefore, today, truer than ever) through the galaxies of dream. It's no coincidence that an album from just a few years back is now almost unanimously regarded as a classic.

Deserter's Songs enchants everyone, with its chanting of melodies as old as the world, reshaped into a new form, as alluring as Homer's Circe. "One of the secrets of our music," Donahue explains, "is its dreamlike quality. We want to create our own little world. That's partly why we called the album 'Deserter's Songs'. We wanted to abandon our past, the things we'd done, the world we live in. And the title was also meant to express a sense of detachment from certain music that's fashionable today, music we feel very distant from. We want to evoke a Proustian sense of 'timelessness', to make even an innocent fragment of melody capable of stirring up turbulent memories. As a child, my mother used to play me classics of easy listening like Sinatra and Bartók. I rebelled against it at the time, but now it's as if I've absorbed the feelings I had at five years old listening to that music, and a lot of our melodies have to do with all of that."

Having brought in keyboardist and drummer Jeff Marcel, Mercury Rev veer toward an even more symphonic sound on All Is Dream (2001), an album that confirms the trend inaugurated by the Buffalo band with Deserter's Songs, smoothing out the rough edges of their early years in favor of an ever more refined, solemn and dreamlike pop. The "spiritual father" of the record is the legendary Jack Nitzsche, who was meant to produce it but died a week before recording began. Nitzsche's imprint is palpable in the "wall of sound" of lush, at times even redundant arrangements, with the heavy use of a vast string section acting as counterpoint to the guitars. "Jack's work has always inspired us," Donahue recalls. "Not just his collaborations with Neil Young and Rolling Stones, but also his film scores, from 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' to 'The Exorcist'."

The effect on the sound is deeply evocative. Donahue and co.'s atmospheres grow ever more abstract and evocative. "The Dark Is Rising" opens delicately, exploding like the most sweeping of 007 film themes, before Donahue's shrill falsetto and a soft piano build an intimate atmosphere, destined to be overtaken once again by the orchestra's crescendo. "Tides Of The Moon" combines rock structures with odd interweavings of keyboards and xylophone, over which Donahue's voice bursts in, singing of a "flight into the surface of the sun." The mysterious "Lincoln's Eyes", on the other hand, blends minimalist atmospheres and Morricone-esque soundscapes with a poignant, Van Dyke Parks-like melody. "Nite And Fog" is a splendid, visionary ballad, while "Drop In Time" is a refined pop watercolor.

The mini-symphonies of previous works are stretched out even further in epic fashion, or else reduced to fragile sketches. What suffers is the noisy verve of Yerself Is Steam. What benefits is the process of deconstructing and reshaping pop clichés that the Buffalo band has pursued over the years, pairing 1950s film scores and vaudeville with the sick psychedelia of the Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd. A project that, with All Is Dream, has perhaps reached its breaking point.

The Secret Migration (2005) is indeed a disappointment. Mercury Rev lower their sights even further, smoothing out even the last psychedelic cries that inhabited the previous record, setting out to painstakingly build a collection of songs that are sophisticated and flowing, but also overly familiar. Kicking things off is the conventional atmospheric pop-song "Secret For A Song". "Across Yer Ocean" has a vocal intro that echoes the rest of the arrangement along a soul-pop melodic line. "Diamonds" still has celestial keyboards, a music-box-like organ, a vocal line that's overflowing but often empty, and a crescendo of grandiose yet predictable atmospheres. "Black Forest", meanwhile, has a successful intro, but it's immediately spoiled by the orchestral filler. Hovering over everything is a calculated production, conventional orchestration, and a largely outdated modus operandi.

What's missing above all are the connective links, the hooks that bind the structures together, the elements that make a song memorable. "Vermillion" has an excellent studio-treatment foundation, and even a brilliant arrangement, but it remains essentially unfinished. "My Love" is a ballad caught between the epic and the romantic that melts away in the languor of the keyboards, while stop-and-go moments and constant shifts in dynamics shape "In The Wilderness", a sunny easy-listening romp of piano and keyboards that today's Cranberries would probably kill for.

"In A Funny Way" is a steadily paced ballad with which they pay their personal tribute to "Pet Sounds", which can only boast Donahue's slightly more melancholy vocals, but also broad emotional swells of strings. "Moving On" is a brief interlude with almost robotically harmonized vocals, and hints of electro flourishes in the background. "The Climbing Rose" has a few more harmonic shifts, and a higher level of pleasantness, but its radio-friendly air and the fact that it resembles other songs on the album too closely send it right back into anonymity. In fact, this track reveals the record's real problems: many songs have nearly identical structures. It closes out a trilogy of tracks that are infectious precisely because of how predictable they are. "Arise" is a gushing power-pop number, livened up by a dash of verve and a vocal-pop touch reminiscent of latter-day Flamin' Groovies, "First-Time Mother's Joy" drops the mask to voice a shameless homage to the britpop of days gone by, and "Down Poured The Heavens" is the final watercolor for piano and voice, still insistently steeped in Spector-esque sweetness.

The record is met with a cold reception, and the harsh law of the internet era (the one that discredits a band at its first misstep) spares not even a formidable group like this one: three years later comes Snowflake Midnight, the first of two companion albums, but the audience seems to have forgotten how Mercury Rev were once able to bounce back in quality after a mediocre record.

Snowflake Midnight (2008) is, without mincing words, their best record since Deserter's Songs, and proof of the rebirth of a band of shapeshifters never satisfied with results achieved and always ready to reinvent themselves. Anyone harboring doubts about the orchestral pop drift of recent years will have to think again in the face of a thoroughly original and distinctive record, in which Mercury Rev reinvigorate the dreamlike atmospheres that have defined them over the last decade with a musical structure that ventures into territory they'd never explored before: that of electronic rhythms.

The approach of Snowflake Midnight is that of psychedelic dream-pop, epic and powerful, drowned in ethereal keyboards and propped up by synthetic beats, creating an amalgam similar to the shoegaze/synth-pop of latter-day M83, with whom they share the devastating charge of sweeping tracks with a velvety, enveloping surface; the differences compared to their past are plain to see: their previous formula was layered but slow and static, whereas here dynamism takes charge, with unexpected scene changes and bursts of distortion, keyboards and orchestration.

The opening track "Snowflake In A Hot World" is the manifesto of this record, a fluttering, fragile yet explosive piece, with a pulsing undercurrent of bass driving an unstoppable charge; "Butterfly's Wing" is calmer, made up of echoing sounds, an almost dance rhythm, samples and Donahue's voice more childlike and sweet than ever. Applause for the electronic pop of "Senses On Fire" — which detonates into an epic breakdown with a tsunami of electronic keyboards — and for the rhythm of "Runaway Raindrop", close to trip-hop with almost industrial outbursts and jazzy passages.

The best track among the nine is "People Are So Unpredictable (There's No Bliss Like Home)", a rainbow of magnificent sounds (thanks to the meticulous production, which involved the whole band alongside the usual Fridmann); "Dream Of A Young Girl As A Flower" is the album's second masterpiece, a track so intricate it feels like a suite: the classically-tinged opening recalls the baroque flourishes of their past records, but the sly electronic groove is a genuine novelty, its grime upending the sublime swells of strings, with a crystal-clear guitar overloaded with delay closing everything out in sweet feedback.

"Faraway From Cars" is another pearl of poetry, its atmosphere suspended in a void, built from horns, a handclapping rhythm and celestial choirs, while "A Squirrel and I" is the most electronic track, with the guitar pushed into the background.

At the same time, Strange Attractor is also released, made available for free on their official website upon signing up to the mailing list. And it's yet another disorienting leap into the dark, into a cinematic digital cosmos.

The record is an intense, regenerating plunge into vast swaths of electronic psychedelia, into retro keyboards in technicolor, whose spiritual atmospheric effect meets dreamlike elements; right from the opening track "Love Is Pure", flowing from one song to the next without interruption.

Realms unfold, paved in a faint, bewitching digital vintage feel with crystalline tones, adorned with sublime guitars and fabulist orchestral touches ("Fable Of A Silver Moon", "Pure Joie De La Solitude", "In My Heart, A Strange Attractor"). The utopias and traumas of lived experience still speak to us, within the polished technological splendour of the present. The result is hybrid musical collages, steeped in other images and multiform textures (the captivating "Nocturne For Norwood", closing the album on an enigmatic note), the kind one can get lost in. Gravity is nullified, materiality dissolved, emotion laid bare.

This instrumental triumph, paradoxically, underscores deep silences, carving out interior spaces.

This isn't the first time Mercury Rev have ventured into a predominantly instrumental work — there was, for instance, the evocative ambient-psych trip released under the name Harmony Rockets (Paralyzed Mind Of The Archangel Void, 1995, Beggars Banquet), a surreal concept record on the searing persistence of memory.

Strange Attractor, specifically, gathers tracks deliberately left not unfinished but suspended, as keyboardist and drummer Jeff Marcel puts it, "open ended", like the ending of certain films, pointing toward a "probable" resolution, possible but not certain; left for the listener to imagine, extending itself into their mind.

A necessary double return for a band that can rightfully be called a cardinal point of contemporary rock.

Seven years on, heedless of the passing of time, aware of having forged a fairy-tale, imaginative language of extraordinary foresight and staying power (the double outing of 2008 standing as excellent proof of the point), the comeback of the five musicians from Buffalo stubbornly continues along the same path, tracing, across the eleven tracks of The Light In You, the contours of an enchanted, gallant symphonic psych-pop, on which to set dreamlike palettes and depict lost worlds.

Even while treading a path so familiar to them, the band nonetheless avoids falling into mere self-replication, not only by working heavily on diversifying their timbres, but above all by intervening on the pop charge of the songs — certainly not forgetting the refined framing that has always adorned them, but shrewdly bringing in a linearity that had long been missing from Donahue and co., roughly since the days of The Secret Migration or thereabouts. While the ruinous missteps of that record — perhaps the band's low point — are certainly absent, in their quest for the perfect sonic formula Mercury Rev end up losing the spark, the spirit that animated their best (and numerous) moments. Across the eleven tracks of the new record, the feeling is one of extreme professionalism, always intriguing in its modulations and ethereal timelessness of tone, but only rarely capable of delivering real vibrations, melodic and emotional jolts that could genuinely be called as such.

From this standpoint, the few happy exceptions to the rule are to be found in the misty autumnal ballad "Central Park East", an excellent blend of narrative and delivery (with Donahue in great vocal form and the music's atmospheric minimalism hinting at a certain epic allure), and in the delicate choral interplay of "Are You Ready?", kept in check by a lively rhythmic drive and a bulletproof melodic touch. For the rest, between vain attempts to liven up the mood with playful James Bond-style winks ("Sunflower") or more pronounced ties to the pop galaxy ("Rainy Day Record"), the songwriting wearily chases after the most ordinary inspiration, content to concoct easy melodic pairings to dress up the lavish deployment of arrangement resources. In a trajectory of lyrical brightening that gradually leads the record to dial down its reflective charge in favour of more luminous flights, the work nevertheless betrays the nature of its own concept, flattening it into a broth of homogeneous neutrality, wholly unsuited to a collection that would start from different premises. Between the hypnotic murmur of "Amelie" (dream-pop in its most faded form) and the lucid dreams of "Autumn's In The Air" (with its all-too-familiar keyboard underpinnings), it's hard, in short, to detect any kind of progress, or to grasp the more intimate meaning of the project as a whole.

A real shame, then, that The Light In You, rather than reaffirming with renewed awareness the linguistic traits and strengths of Mercury Rev's art, ends up highlighting its least interesting aspects, the shortcomings and predictabilities one would hope to avoid, in a negative Cliff's Notes version that adds nothing to the extraordinary career of Donahue and co.

In 2018 Donahue and Grassoppher not only announced a new Mercury Rev album but also revived the Harmony Rockets moniker.

Lachesis / Clotho / Atropos is a tribute to lysergic rock and the golden age of Woodstock. It's no coincidence that, alongside the two Mercury Rev members, the project also brings in Jesse Chandler, Nels Cline (Wilco), Martin Keith and Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), as well as Peter Walker: a folk guitarist who influenced John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Leo Kottke, but above all the American psychedelic underground scene.

The album is made up of three lengthy compositions, three different ideas that unfold through adventurous psychedelic digressions, far removed from the mainstream sound of the latest Mercury Rev records.

The album opens with "Lachesis," a seventeen-minute raga-driven suite that unfolds into Grateful Dead-style space-rock, offering Cline and Grassoppher the perfect backdrop for an enveloping instrumental duel, forever teetering between chaos and meditation.

The magic repeats itself with slightly darker, more obsessive tones on "Clotho": a track driven by a more frenetic rhythm and a whirlwind of noise-rock softened by the sound of a Farfisa organ. It's in "Atropos," however, that the instrumental alchemy yields its finest results: seven minutes and forty seconds of pure psychedelic liturgy, with flowing jazz, folk fragments and lyrical refinements that fully dust off the best ideas of Deserter's Songs.

The second project under the Harmony Rockets name looks decidedly to the past, and it's in this nostalgic vein that the announced Mercury Rev remake of a Bobbie Gentry album (The Delta Sweete Revisited) fits in, featuring no fewer than twelve female voices.

For this covers record, the Buffalo band decided to temporarily set aside their frontman's hypnotic, sugary voice and entrust Bobbie's words to an all-star roster of female voices, which might suggest marketing strategies or the band's fear of not being fully up to the comparison.

Jumping straight to the conclusions, it can be said right away that none of these premises affected the final result, thanks to a measured, carefully calibrated approach to the arrangements, which don't aim to overturn the original perspective but rather add small touches here and there, broadening the project's aesthetic without distorting its nature.

At the same time, Mercury Rev don't simply content themselves with a plain revisiting of Gentry's record: having set aside the more experimental spirit revived in the Harmony Rockets project, what remains of their sound here is thick, dramatic, yet essential.

The sonic screenplay gives more room to strings and violins, favouring dreamy, velvety atmospheres. And so it goes from the overture "Okolona River Bottom Band" onward, in which Norah Jones is made to soul her way gracefully through a hazily contoured atmosphere, amid smoky synths, barely-touched piano and hi-hat. Narcoleptic slide guitar and a battered Wurlitzer instead accompany Hope Sandoval on a sensual, torpid version of "Big Boss Man," all dust and warmth. While remaining cohesive and unified, the album predictably alternates some more successful tracks with others that are purely functional to the whole. Despite arrangements that, depending on the track, stray more or less from the originals, what's never betrayed is the innovative, kaleidoscopic spirit of Gentry's sophomore record.

The meeting between the harmonica on "Reunion" and Rachel Goswell's vocal trills proves rather ineffective, while Lucinda Williams draws out the bluesiest spirit of "Ode To Billie Joe" without fully capturing the soul of Bobbie Gentry's most famous song.

Norway's Susanne Sundfør gets the job of shuffling the deck with one of the album's most gripping moments, the lively bass-guided "Tobacco Road".

The gold medal, however, goes to Margo Price for her sensational interpretation of "Sermon". More in tune with the Sixties spirit are the two versions entrusted to two of the most interesting voices of the Eighties, namely Beth Orton ("Courtyard") and Laetitia Sadier ("Mornin' Glory"), while it falls to Phoebe Bridgers to raise the album's ecstatic tone with a charming, very faithful cover of "Jesseye' Lisabeth".

Vashti Bunyan and Kaela Sinclair take on the task of breathing new life into the bucolic vistas of "Penduli Pendulum," in a version featuring a solemn piano in place of the guitar.

After the welcome return under the Harmony Rockets name and the tribute to Bobbie Gentry, Mercury Rev finally show that they have recovered the intensity they had lost.

The American outfit starts a new chapter in 2024 with the arrival of two new members – Jesse Chandler on piano and Marion Genser on keyboards – with Jonathan Donahue acting as master of ceremonies of a chamber-pop liturgy where singing cedes its scepter to speech and whisper, shifting the band's music toward surreal and unusual territories. Guitars, keyboards, strings, horns, percussion and drums indulge a dreamlike stream of melodic and lyrical consciousness, a succession of emotionally steady moods that never seem to run aground on any reef. Born Horses (2024) is a spiritual, sensory journey that induces a noble kind of torpor, light years away from the corrosive dissonances of Boces and deliberately closer to Tony Conrad's minimalism. The Mercury Rev comeback feeds on the sounds of nature and its shifting reflections: like a modern-day pied piper, Donahue scatters words and silences that, like enchanting harmonies, lure birds, horses and anyone willing to be caught in the web of a dark, disorienting tale. It's an album that only seems monotone; in fact it's full of flashes and emotional shifts entrusted to Donahue's voice, which, with the same charm as Don Quixote, leads the listener through the remnants of old psychedelic flights ("Patterns") or through chilly jazz temptations that don't crave cerebral repetition ("Mood Swings"). The deep meaning of an album that will once again divide listeners – not everyone is willing to follow the tortuous chamber-pop-baroque digressions offered by the title track, which a sax solo stirs without disturbing – is contained within these eight tracks.

Born Horses is a celebration of whispered, candor-rich poetry, the kind that the four minutes and twelve seconds of "A Bird Of No Address" celebrate with epic, timeless tones, with a melodic apotheosis worthy of the best Sigur Ros.

In a project that at times is this extreme, pitfalls and snares are inevitable: a track like "Ancient Love" remains suspended between magic and monotony, while the long dialogue that unfolds over the otherwise pleasant notes of "Everything I Thought I Had Lost" feels more like a warning. In this hazy, hallucinatory web of dreamlike ideas, fragments of old film reels and dusty images, Mercury Rev prove most convincing when sobriety and melody go hand in hand ("Your Hammer, My Heart") or when the harmonic ideas flow with greater drive (the aforementioned "Patterns").

Mercury Rev dare and take risks on the placidly ambitious Born Horses; at times they seem to stumble in the spaces separating the real world from dreamlike catalepsy, leaving a faint sense of incompleteness that the not entirely successful rhythmic foray of "There's Always Been A Bird In Me" doesn't fully sweep away, though without undermining its intense, moving, reflective nature.

Contributions by Cristian Degano ("All Is Dream"), Michele Saran ("The Secret Migration"), Fabio Russo ("Strange Attractor"), Vassilios Karagiannis ("The Light In You"), Gianfranco Marmoro (Harmony Rockets: “Lachesis / Clotho / Atropos”), Gianfranco Marmoro and Michele Corrado ("Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited", "Born Horses")

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