‘Deserter’s Songs’ by Mercury Rev

‘Deserter’s Songs’ was the first album by Mercury Rev that I came across, and that’s true for most of the world. It was released to widespread critical acclaim, though mass commercial success wouldn’t be a side-effect of this. However, it did well enough for the band to change their mind about giving up, which was no bad thing in itself.

Apparently, suspecting it to be their last album, the band made a deliberate choice to make an album entirely for their own benefit, with no allowances made for others. It shows. From the beginning, the album throws you into a surreal dream-like world, a world where choruses don’t exist, strange theremin-like noises rule, and spelling is irrelevant. ‘Holes’, ‘Tonite It Shows’ and ‘Endlessly’, the albums first three tracks, are a mass of wobbly orchestrations, nonsensical lyrics, and Jonathan Donahue’s voice – beautiful, in its own way, but not for everyone.

Signs of relative normality appear as the album goes on. ‘Opus 40’ and ‘Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp’ all managed to nudge into the charts without sounding ridiculously out of place, but even ‘Goddess On A Highway’, the albums lead single and most identifiable track, doesn’t have ‘major hit single’ written all over it. Sitting in the middle of the album is ‘The Hudson Line’, perhaps the most conventional song on the record. Ironically, perhaps deliberately, it sounds somewhat out of place.

Like the Mercury Rev catalogue at larger, ‘Deserter’s Songs’ is not an album which would be to everyone’s tastes, and I imagine a number of those who sang its praises from the rooftops at the time would be somewhat less enthusiastic now. Nevertheless, it contains real beauty, and it’s unusualness as an album is something to be cherished.