“You've Gone With So Little For So Long”, featuring strings that sound like they’re sampled from a Gershwin musical, has the light touch instrumentation and angelic choral singing of the beautiful “Endlessly”. While the album isn’t a reprise of Deserter’s Songs, they readily admit that some of the songs here retain its DNA. It ends with the reflective line "sometimes years go by, it seems", which would appear to be a reference to the lengthy period since 2008s Snowflake Midnight.
With Donahue’s vocal drenched in reverb the singing sounds like dreamspeak - trippy but awestruck, as the music whips up a hurricane before reining it in. “The Queen Of Swans” is a suitably stately and love-struck opening, all blissful strings, skipping military drums and a hypnotic distorted brass in the background. The Light In You sees them walk similarly hallowed ground. Returning to and refining the poise and melancholy of Yerself Is Steam’s swoonsome “Car Wash Hair”, they injected Deserter’s Songs with a musical panorama they’d always hinted was in their grasp. However, they amazed everyone (perhaps themselves most of all) with the commercial success of 1998’s Deserter’s Songs, an album which could instead have been titled ‘Survivors Songs’, so close did they seem to be on the brink.
Yet when Baker left after their second record 1993s Boces, the sound that would eventually define Mercury Rev started to come to fruition. Their original singer David Baker was all kinds of maverick, yet erratic with it.
When they released their debut, 1991s Yerself Is Steam (a contender for best album title pun ever) so chaotic was the band and the music, as can be heard on the brilliantly mind-boggling freakout of “Chasing A Bee”, it was doubtful they’d make another.
0 kommentar(er)
