The New Mercury Rev
By: V. Rachel Weldon
Jan. 28, 2009 – Buffalo, United States
"I bought a Robin Guthrie record, Cocteau Twins, a John Prine record, Leonard Cohen, John Cale," says Mercury Rev's guitarist and clarinet player, Grasshopper (a.k.a. Sean Mackowiak), listing the albums he bought the day before in New York City. He was in town promoting his band's 2008 releases, Strange Attractor and Snowflake Midnight.
The artists he continued to name off are discernable must-hears for any bleeding-heart lyricist or folk artist from New York – or from anywhere else. Grasshopper and his Mercury Rev bandmates, Jonathan Donahue and Jeff Mercel, however, are neither. Rather, their music demonstrates an entirely unconventional mix of psychedelica and noise rock, with waves of swirling melodies and delicate vocal tinkerings everywhere in between.
Their latest two albums follow suit as stunning psyche rock and electronica hybrids. Strange Attractor, the band's highly anticipated follow up to 2005's The Secret Migration, hit record stores on September 29th, 2008. On the same day, listeners were offered Snowflake Midnight as a free download online, whether they bought its companion album or not. Was this a statement about present music industry hot button topics such as declining record sales and piracy? Well, no actually, according to Grasshopper, it wasn't at all. Snowflake Midnight was merely the product of a fortunate abundance of material, and the band chose to release it online to save costs on packaging. Sometimes a free record is just a free record.
Emerging from Buffalo, New York in the mid-'80s, the band's first recordings were created for the soundtracks of experimental films made by friends and peers at the University of Buffalo, which Grasshopper attended. "We did some soundtracks for student films that showed at some of the galleries in Buffalo," he explains. "We were also doing soundtracks for nature films. Some of our friends were making them and some of them were for the local PBS station."
Years later, in 2005, the band recorded Hello Blackbird, the soundtrack to a 1920s period film called Bye Bye Blackbird, proving old habits do indeed die hard. The music created for this film rekindled the band's forgotten interest in refined drone music, something that has since come to the forefront of their sound.
Mercury Rev's emergence onto the global music scene, and particularly the UK, was a quick leap past obstacles most bands encounter on the road to industry success. Their third ever gig was played to a crowd of 10,000 at the Reading Festival in the UK, where, for the first time, a mass audience was exposed not only to their music, but also to the spectacle of their live performance. "We played a really good show," Grasshopper explains. "I think that helped. I had never been to anything like that." That day, as well as critical nods from American magazines like Melody Maker, contributed to a sprint towards the band's early success.
Hailing from New York, Grasshopper didn't need to search far from home for influences; the frayed edges of the 1960s punk scene was cause enough for a celebration in Mercury Rev's music. Blending that with Donahue's penchant for British Invasion rock 'n' roll and a consensual fascination with the obscure and experimental, the band created their own unique sound. "I was into bands like The Velvet Underground and other stuff from out of the New York punk scene. But then we introduced each other to all that different kind of music and tried to meld it into something different."
In 1998, the band released the bewitching Deserter's Songs, their most successful record to date. The album – declared the best of that year by the NME and Mojo – is ten tracks of uplifting orchestral palpitations and playful lyrics, pregnant with an air of revisited teenage romance and heartache. Mercury Rev credited their burgeoning critical acclaim to the band's reinvention of their sound while writing the album and, as a result, the notion tickled the fingertips of music journalists and critics across the board. What do you call a comeback if there is nothing to come back from?
Now, it seems the band has reinvented themselves once again on their latest releases; or have at least reconsidered their approach to songwriting. They have snuffed out whatever warmth melted their hearts in ‘98, inclining their music today towards a subtle poignancy not quite like anything they've created before. That's not to say their rebirth is for the better or worse, but perhaps for the melancholic and distorted.
Whether you want to call it a comeback, a reinvention or simply an anticipated and welcome return to the music scene, Mercury Rev's pair of releases in 2008 invite non-judgemental listening ears. The least we can do is see what all the buzz is all about.
Video: "Butterfly's Wing" by Mercury Rev
