Mercury Rev are often discussed in terms of sudden and dramatic swerves in direction. Granted, their original vocalist, David Baker, was unceremoniously ousted following the band’s second album. Soon after, the screeching feedback, weird drones, loud guitars and general unhinged nature of their early work became tempered by gentler introspection and ornate string arrangements, notably circa 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. Later still, the almost Disney-like ditties which epitomised 2005’s The Secret Migration were followed by a surprising digression into electronics-aided looseness.
Even so, as sole constant members Jonathan Donahue and Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak tell us, there are thematic continuities that can be traced all the way through Mercury Rev’s extraordinary career.
“It’s more of an evolution than a mutation,” says Donahue, backstage following the Rev’s rapturously received show at Leeds Brudenell Social Club on 13 December 2018. He recalls that his group first made attempts at creating symphonic music around four years before their 1991 debut album.
“We just didn’t have the lexicon, musically, so we used feedback or strangeness in place of an orchestral movement,” he muses. “The threads are there. If you step far enough away from the micro focus and put it into the macro, you would see an arc. It’s more of a sine wave than a sawtooth.”
Yerself Is Steam
(Mint Film MINTLP 4, LP, 1991) £25
To casual observers, Mercury Rev’s chaotic debut shares few similarities with the elegance of their later output. Splattered in thick distortion and wallowing in its own hazy incoherence, Yerself Is Steam offered a particularly swampy take on psychedelia.
Grasshopper: When we started, people like Rhys Chatham were doing guitar orchestras. [The music of] Tony Conrad and Terry Riley was orchestration but using drones and feedback and, with La Monte Young, very slow blues progressions. It’s all connected. Even those [avant-noise] guys, Glenn Branca or whoever, moved into sometimes writing for orchestras with strings. In a way, it’s just switching the colours and timbres of the instruments. It was always in there.
Donahue: If there are two polarities in Mercury Rev, it’s children’s records and the avant-garde. We grew up with records like Peter And The Wolf narratives on beds of orchestration. Then, as teenagers, we were attracted to the experimental music of Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad and Terry Riley. The pendulum swings between those two things. We still swing that way, and sometimes we meet in the middle. But you’ll notice that for Mercury Rev, pop came last. We didn’t have that craft of bridge-chorus-solo-middle-eight. It took a long time to distil that out.
Boces
(Beggars Banquet
BBQLP 140, transparent red LP, 1991) £20
If Mercury Rev’s debut made it sound as though the group could barely keep it together, by their second album things had really started to fragment. Singer David Baker departed shortly after its release [due to musical and personal conflicts, and a strange habit of wandering offstage mid-song – Ed]. Donahue later observed that listening to Boces was as awkward as bumping into an ex-girlfriend.
Grasshopper: It’s painful to listen to because of the process of making it, but it was a bold and broad statement. There’s a lot of stuff in there to unpack.
Donahue: I see it like looking back at layers of history. Boces is the one that’s right there in the dirt, the blackened one, with the volcanic ash where the town got levelled by war and strife.
Grasshopper: The Pompeii.
Donahue: Yeah, you can go back and find interesting artefacts inside the black soot. But if you were there when it happened, you’re not too willing to start poking ghosts. It was coloured by things I sometimes wish I could take back. I don’t think it’s unlike almost every band. It’s just usually that’s the end of a band’s career, when they’re on their sixth record and people are either too broke or too rich to give a shit and it falls apart. We were like a Doors biography in reverse. Everything happened right at the beginning.
See You On
The Other Side (Beggars Banquet BBQLP 176 P, picture disc LP, 1995) £30
The first album with Donahue as lead singer found Mercury Rev performing to diminishing audiences. With its harmonies, jazz flutes and French horn parts, the record hardly captured the mid-90s zeitgeist. The band recall Peel Session engineers gawping in disbelief when they rolled up to record I Only Have Eyes For You or songs from Willy Wonka (Peel himself was consistently supportive).
Grasshopper: It just didn’t click. Or it wasn’t worked by the label, perhaps because of Britpop.
Donahue: It wasn’t necessarily that nobody wanted to ever hear oboes or flutes again.
We weren’t in competition with Oasis or Blur. We simply felt we’d put so much into See You On The Other Side. When you have something so precious but so small… it’s like you’re doing this little violin part and behind you is the loudest thing in the world. You want people to hear it but it couldn’t rise above the din. It got overrun by the Huns of music. That’s not a dis towards some of the anthems or jangles from that time; it’s more an observation. I don’t know why we were surprised. We were so disconnected, I thought Everlasting Arm would be a massive hit single.
Grasshopper: Some people were scared of us because of our personas and the drugs we were on at the time. That didn’t help.
Deserter’s Songs
(V2 VVR 1002771, LP, 1998) £50
While recording this album, Mercury Rev
had the distinct impression it could be their last. This sense of defeat helped unlock the beauty that had always been deeply embedded in the band’s core. Written acoustically, embellished by symphonic string and brass sections and spectacularly melancholic, Deserter’s Songs was hailed by some as a modern equivalent of Pet Sounds.
Donahue: We’d sold a lot of equipment for drugs so we didn’t have many guitars to play. It wasn’t that we could never touch an electric guitar again. The thought of going back to that place didn’t seem a good idea.
Grasshopper: In a way, it’s just focused differently [from the album before]. It’s a film that’s shot with a different camera or lens but has some of the same elements, like turning
up the saturation level on a colour screen.
Donahue: Deserter’s Songs was like this limping gazelle. I was hoping it wouldn’t get picked off from the herd, that it would come out in some sort of dribbly way. Then we visited Reading Festival before it came out. We weren’t playing, we were just backstage. All these musicians and journalists came running up going, “Whoa! Advance copy!”
I didn’t even realise they were talking about us.
Grasshopper: A month or two after it came out, we were in London. I was in Sainsbury’s buying some groceries and heard this familiar song playing… What’s that? That’s us! That was the moment. Wow. Getting played in the supermarket.
All Is Dream (V2 VVR 1017521, LP, 2001) £40
The sequel to Deserter’s Songs upped the orchestral ante and had an even darker feel. “I dreamed of you on my farm/
I dreamed of you in my arms,” run its opening lines, followed directly by this bleakly humorous sucker-punch: “But dreams are always wrong.”
Donahue: It’s the idea of the image not being the actual. Whatever you set up in your brain, looking for a result from something always gets in the way of things, rather than being as open as you can to what the future might hold. It gets you into a lot of problems if you try to lasso these running Mustangs of money, popularity or credibility. The albums I had the least hope for seem to be the ones everybody really likes. The albums I felt were real gems? You could swing a rope at tonight’s concert and not hit anyone who owns them.
The Secret Migration (V2 VVR 1029231, LP, 2005) £20
After the success
of the previous two albums, Mercury Rev
came crashing down to earth when their next was greeted by an unwarranted number of critical drubbings. The novelty of the band’s symphonic psychedelia had abated and reviewers felt unconvinced by the record’s apparent conventionality and cheerier (and thus less “cool”) outlook.
Donahue: That’s another example of pop coming late to us. Those were shorter songs, crafted with more structure. For us, that was experimentation. Most bands have nine pop songs and one six-minute song which is their show-ending epic. We always had six nine-minute songs and one that was three and a half minutes. But Secret Migration had 10 of them and it just got destroyed. I was writing about nature as a metaphor for things I thought were going on inside me. That part, I know, disturbed people. “Why is this guy writing about birds and lakes? This is 2005. Can’t this guy get it together? We want sad songs about breakups.”
Snowflake Midnight/ Strange Attractor (V2 VVR 1051271, 2LP, 2008) £18
Another rejuvenating moment, on Snowflake Midnight Mercury Rev pushed themselves into uncharted territory by incorporating electronic elements, picking up different instruments and composing in a more spontaneous manner. Its mostly-instrumental companion album, Strange Attractor (the second disc on the double-LP), was simultaneously released as a free download.
Donahue: Those songs are a lot less structured and more stream-of-consciousness. Some parts have different textures which are less natural, using old synthesisers and things. On Snowflake Midnight, I hear a lot of the experimental sides to us which are trying to not just be weird but to have an emotional context to the experimentation. Anybody can bang on a detuned piano for five minutes and call it avant-garde. To have emotion in it, that’s the tricky part. Snowflake Midnight has some really great moments and it brought back people who realised they hadn’t lost Mercury Rev to this pop thing.
Grasshopper: It was fun to make and to
do things differently from before. We were running synthesisers through guitar effects or using other methods completely to make sounds, almost like sound sculpture.
Donahue: Do you know how many people were angry Strange Attractor came out for free? “You released this album for free. Why?” Well, we wanted people to have
it as a companion album. It’s not really got lyrics on it but we think it’s special…
It seemed to throw people, again. They thought there was an ulterior motive.
“Is there some sort of homing device in Strange Attractor that will watch me in my bathroom at night?” It was another one of those weird Mercury Rev moments when you weren’t sure which way was up.
Grasshopper: We should’ve charged 15 dollars apiece.
Donahue: We were trying to convince them it’s still music, we’re just not charging you for it. Don’t you still want it?
Grasshopper: “Intrinsically, it then doesn’t have any value for me.”
The Light In You
(Bella Union BELLA 504V, white LP, 2015) £10
There was an unusually long gap before Mercury Rev’s next album. When it did arrive, it turned out to be their first studio outing to feature zero input from the band’s ex-bassist turned renowned record producer Dave Fridmann.
Donahue: Time moves differently in the Catskill mountains. It didn’t occur to me
it was seven years. We hadn’t walked away from music. There was precedent for gaps between albums.
Grasshopper: My Bloody Valentine. Wasn’t that, like, 30 years? [Actually, there were 31 years between 1992’s Loveless and 2013’s m b v – Ed].
Donahue: In the pop world, bands had big careers in those seven years and now they’re gone. I think there was an entire genre or two that arose and fell in that period. People would say, “Hey, I thought one of you guys had died.” It was a strong record, I thought, to come back with.
Grasshopper: Dave [Fridmann] was busy doing other stuff. We were busy. Then we ended up doing it on our own and it was working. And it worked.
Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited (Bella Union BELLA 852 V, LP, 2019) £18
Donahue’s voice may be effeminate or androgynous but when covering this Bobbie Gentry album in full the band invited a different female singer
to front each number. They include Beth Orton, Norah Jones and Lucinda Williams.
Donahue: The guest vocalists were the way into the album, emotionally. It wasn’t through a male vocal.
Grasshopper: It had to be that way. Telling the whole story that is The Delta Sweete, some are songs she listened to as a little girl and a lot are songs she wrote which relate to those earlier songs. It was all from a female perspective. That was very important.
Donahue: She feminised those masculine songs that had always had a heavy male imprint – Big Boss Man, Parchment Farm.
It would’ve been such a mistake to re-masculine something she’d so tenderly feminised.
Grasshopper: While making it, we didn’t realise it coincided with the 50th anniversary.
Donahue: If we were looking to cover a whole record shouldn’t we have done “The White Album” or something people actually know? In typical Mercury Rev fashion, we chose a record nobody’s heard of, by quite an obscure artist. If you told anybody on paper, these Technicolor guys from the Catskills are going to do a country record by a woman who walked away from music…
Grasshopper: Then again, maybe that makes complete sense.
Donahue: That’s probably the only thing we were born to do. Something off the page.
Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited is released by Bella Union.
