‘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.

'All Is Dream' by Mercury Rev

‘All Is Dream’ was my first Mercury Rev album. I’d first become aware of the band with the release of their previous album, but their appeal hadn’t really clicked. A few years on, when ‘The Dark Is Rising’ was getting airplay, I became intrigued enough to buy it’s parent album, and it’s been something a background favourite ever since.

‘The Dark Is Rising’ is the first track on the album, and it’s essentially the album in miniature. Sweeping strings, piano chords, and a falsetto voice that really only a mother could love. Jonathan Donahue, the band’s vocalist has one of those voices destined for cult appeal. It’s not bad, exactly, but it certainly isn’t to everyone’s taste. You need to like your singers with a bit of individuality.

The falsetto is very evident in the first few tracks, coming to the fore in both ‘Chains’ and ‘Lincoln’s Eyes’. The latter of these two tracks is perhaps the defining moment of the album, in that you could very easily hate it. If you enjoy ‘Lincoln’s Eyes’, you’ll like the rest of the album – simple. ‘Nite and Fog’, which follows it, is a perhaps necessary concession to writing a normal song – it even has a chorus. It also sounds effortlessly constructed – as if the band have thrown it into the record just to prove that they can.

The rest of the album is a fascinating, and at times, bewildering collection of soundscapes. ‘Tides Of The Moon’ drifts in and out like an excerpt from a song that never ends. ‘A Drop In Time’ sounds like a lullaby from a world of magic, ‘Spiders And Flies’ is a sad piano ballad about, apparently, flies and spiders, and ‘Hercules’ is a textbook example of how to build a song from nothing into a towering column of noise.

‘All Is Dream’ is not a conventional indie record. It’s aptly titled, and it genuinely feels like it occupies some strange position somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. It is, however, not quite like any other record, and that’s reason enough to listen to it.