Mercury Rev

Thirteen years and they don't show it at all. That's how much time separates us from the release of "Deserter's Songs", the masterpiece by Mercury Rev and their best-known album. A revisiting operation has been announced, with a remastered double CD including demos, outtakes and various production leftovers, and a celebratory tour across Europe is also being planned, with particular attention to England and Ireland. After a captivating double album like "Snowflake Midnight"-"Strange Attractor", released in 2008, the band is back in the spotlight with a wide-ranging project, to which fans have reacted with great excitement from the very moment the news leaked online.

Epic and delightful storytellers of a psychedelia that's anything but ordinary, Mercury Rev have been, and still are, a band bursting with revolutionary ideas. Delicate songwriters carrying an inspiration that never needs to shout, their fame has been built on albums that are flawless from every angle.

The evening of May 11th offers a mild late-spring setting for an event that would be an understatement to call unique. After the opening set by Italian post-rockers Julie's Haircut (their sonic surges were quite compelling), the five musicians from Buffalo take the stage, and the crowd's enthusiasm - though not exactly huge in numbers - is guaranteed. The structure of the performance is decidedly straightforward: after a faithful run-through of "Deserter's Songs", the band returns to the stage for a second set featuring a few gems from their extensive discography.

The first impression isn't entirely positive: the large-venue setting pushes the band toward a decidedly rockier sound, at the expense of the sweet, elegiac outpourings found on record. The guitar clutter, combined with a drummer too frantic for such a distinctive sound, ends up almost completely burying Jonathan Donahue's gorgeous voice. Unfortunately this skewed balance of tones affects nearly every song, and is only partly offset in the livelier tracks, where a stronger rhythmic drive is, rightly, called for.

Still, the singer's dazzling form (a truly theatrical performer) combined with the wondrous keyboard melodies manages to conjure an equally evocative atmosphere. Aside from a few instrumental codas of real impact, the renditions come across as solid but not especially reinterpreted; even so, there's hardly any need for novelty given the formal and emotional perfection of songs like "Holes", "Tonite It Shows" or "Opus 40". Donahue's angelic vocal flights set against the keyboard lines are the greatest gift '90s music has given us, and hearing these sounds live is a genuine waking dream.

The almost amusing surprise is the strict adherence to the album's tracklist, which even includes a performance of the three brief instrumentals placed at strategic points throughout the record.

After the musicians return to the stage, the concert reaches its most dazzling peak with the pop explosions of the epic "The Dark Is Rising" and the rhythmic chaos of "Senses On Fire", in a roar of sound and feeling that provides a fitting close to a performance that is, at times, truly moving. With the caveats already noted, the show reaches levels of real excellence at several points, delivering moments of pure nostalgic emotion.

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