Mercury Rev-olution! It’s scary to think that a full decade has passed since MR’s big breakthrough, Deserter’s Songs (from this writer’s perspective, at least). Their next two albums – 2001’s All Is Dream and 2005’s The Secret Migration – didn’t achieve the same chart success, but they were beautifully ethereal efforts all the same.
From the sounds of this artful seventh album, the band have seriously updated the equipment in their remote Catskills studio. Snowflake/Midnight is ethereal, too, but also far more electronic than previous offerings. Produced by bassist David Fridmann, these nine songs are awash with loops, effects, samples and spacey sequences. What does it sound like? Like a swathe of trees being cut down by laser beams outside their studio window. With only you there to hear it.
According to the band website, “the entire album sequence appears to be a resplendent fractal, folding in upon itself, into something continually new, unpredictable and spontaneous, and yet, paradoxically at times so subtly self-aware, never failing to resemble itself in the whole...”
That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Pretentious as they seem, though, they’re not pretending anything. The titles alone testify that this band’s forest is on creative fire: ‘Butterfly’s Wing’, ‘Dream Of A Young Girl As A Flower’, ‘Runaway Raindrop’, ‘A Squirrel And I (Holding On... And Then Letting Go)’.
However spacey it gets, Jonathan Donahue’s distinctive vocals hold the whole thing together. This man sings like his death depends on it. On ‘Faraway From Cars’, he croons, “Faraway from cars/faraway from cash/Faraway from war/Faraway from tears.”
Fans of Mercury Rev (and, indeed, of close associates Flaming Lips) will find much to love and admire in these 41 minutes of subtle, sublime and sonically subversive songs. As for mainstream success, well... they probably haven’t got a snowflakes chance in hell.
Key track: ‘Faraway from cars’