Mercury Rev

Fairy tales have always held archetypal value in the collective memory; they often coincide with myth and its cultural significance. Mercury Rev's "Deserter's Songs" enchants with its chanting of melodies as old as the world itself, reshaped into a new form as beguiling as Homer's Circe. It's a disorienting album, with its grandiloquent orchestration, its belle-époque rustle, its pop perfect in structure, its singing so graceful and out of time. And yet, despite all this, what strikes most 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 band from Buffalo, New York, has always been well aware of this, ever since their astonishing debut "Yerself Is Steam", a magnificent meeting of Velvet-inspired psychedelia and pop instinct. Back then, however, it was the delirious, decentred element that prevailed, through complex sonic destructurings carried out under the surface - narcoleptic guitar distortions, an almost unwieldy stratification of sound layers. On "Deserter's Songs", the shift already begun on the albums following their debut ("Boces" and "See You On the Other Side") is completed once and for all, moving the centre of gravity towards a more classic song-form - one in which, paradoxically, the deconstructionist message launched earlier (the absence of any single foundation of reality) gains even greater weight.

In an age that has witnessed the death of God, Mercury Rev's art proves to be an exquisite expression of polycentrism, almost a renewal of hope in a world stripped of the gravitational centre around which every single existence had revolved for millennia. Their music, and this album in particular, is a knowing reprise of the past that is never an end in itself: the most genuine pop (Beatles) and the least turbulent psychedelia (Velvet Underground), certain mannerisms typical of progressive rock and the apocalyptic anxiety of new wave, all recreated with great skill, proving how, in an anti-Platonic twist, the copy can even surpass the original. To discover all this, one need only sink into the magical world created by the twelve tracks (eleven "official" plus a ghost track) of this record, the zenith of their creativity in that it perfectly balances the band's two souls: the subversive, noisy one, and the one devoted to form and perfection.

The opening, fairy-tale-like and dreamy (it's no coincidence one of their albums is titled "All Is Dream"), is entrusted to the splendid "Holes", in which time seems to dissolve into a golden eternity made of rivers of fantasy and lopsided characters (moles, flies) accompanied by Olympian visions. As the record unfolds, the sense of estrangement grows and sublimates into ever more clever and purely fantastical images (the word "dream" recurs often in the lyrics), resting on a shifting musical fabric: now lyrical and dreamlike ("Endlessly"), now extraordinarily weighted in its melody (the imperious "Opus 40" and "Goddess On A Highway", a wonderful catalyst for placid, crystalline visions), now unsettling and gothic-tinged ("Pick Up If You're There", which teaches us that every good fairy tale needs its wolf), and finally even danceable ("Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp").

The instrumental apparatus is nothing short of grandiose: alongside rock's classic line-up (guitar, bass, drums, keyboards) come numerous elements borrowed 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 early-20th-century jazz atmosphere of the instrumental "I Collect Coins", with its production so dirty and antiquated, the string carpet 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 unfolds through an extraordinary cumulative progression, 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, one suddenly glimpsed an immense clearing - enveloping the listener in their baroque magic. The differences in arrangement are remarkable, aimed at evoking the past (hiss and grime) while placing it in the present (a crystalline sonic fabric) and at expanding space (a wealth of ingredients set within an epic, cinematic scenario), testimony to music with neither time nor borders.

The multivocal nature of their art nonetheless doesn't stop Mercury Rev from maintaining strong cohesion and consistency within their work, as if the unwieldy field of forces set in motion converged centripetally toward the creative act itself, self-reflexive and therefore unified. The album's title also recalls the asceticism of the anchorite tradition, evoking the way monks in the early Middle Ages would withdraw in solitude into the desert, leading a secluded life guided by a misanthropic love of God. Fittingly, this image suits perfectly the rapture experienced by the listener of "Deserter's Songs": an imaginary escape (and therefore, today, truer than ever) through the galaxies of dream. It's no coincidence that an album barely a few years old is already almost unanimously regarded as a classic.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

02/11/2006