Mercury Rev were once an American fringe oddity. I had an image of them in my mind as some sort of acid-fried, art-damaged skronk machine loved only by Thurston Moore.
Maybe that's accurate, maybe not. (I can't claim familiarity with those early LPs.) Credit the British press, however, with trumpeting the new incarnation of the Rev sufficiently enough for these ears to hear. Shed of former vocalist David Baker (whom I once heard described as "one of the most annoying men in rock"), the upstate New York combo began, with 1995's See You On The Other Side, to approach a no less experimental, but decidedly more tuneful track of searching pop classicism. With their latest, Deserter's Songs, they tear the roof off.
The first three tracks alone are a modern-day aural Fantasia, creating a suite of whimsical, nostalgic human wonder with the aid of vintage string machines, bowed saw, space-rock guitar crashes, and Jonathan Donahue's frail, cracked vocals and impressionistic lyrics ("They way we were/the day we met/the way I lit your cigarette/the way it turned into a strange/Cole Porter phrase", from "Tonite It Shows"). The mood is often psychedelic but never druggy, more evocative of a child on Christmas Eve or a starlit car drive than any '60s excess. Comparisons can be drawn to the latest Eels record or the Elephant 6 crew (especially Neutral Milk Hotel) but aside from that, no one else is doing anything like this.
Deserter's Songs is the sort of album so crammed with magic that it's nigh impossible to pick a favorite song. Cases can be made for any of the first three tracks (especially the grand "Tonite It Shows"), the Portishead-meets-Pink Floyd tumult of "The Funny Bird", or the jubilant, remix-ready (actually, the Chemical Bros. have already done this one) throb of "Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp". To listen to Deserter's Songs is to hear the cathartic discoveries of a band willing to eschew expectations for a purer vision.
--Lane Hewitt