Mercury
Rev
Deserter's Songs (1998)
This is a truly beautiful album. A great many
famous names spring to mind. There's an obvious emulation of vintage Brian
Wilson, with lush, symphonic arrangements and the bowed saw in place
of the theremin. There's a bit of Beatles and a bit of "Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young's" country-esque style at times (on parts of "Opus 40"
and parts of "Goddess on a Hiway"). It's one of those records where you
keep saying to yourself: "Wait a minute, that sounds like…" but never actually
coming up with the actual band name. This phenomenon only occurs when the
band has done its work well. When the music's "referenced" but doesn't
"lift" stuff or rip-off existing pieces. It means the work is done with
talent, in style. This mustn't give you the impression that "Deserter's
songs" is all references and influence. The band manage to blend influences,
musical periods, references to film and to avant-garde music into their
own particular blend of pop.
Although I'm at a loss to explain this clearly,
I feel there is a lot of "eighties" in the album. I'm talking about a kind
of eighties "lost" feeling. The songs are mostly slow. They are not slow
in a laid-back, hippy kind of way (though there's a dose of that in the
album). They're kind of slow in a "spaced-out" lonely, fragile, eighties
kind of way. Or maybe they're both. Although conveying emotion, the voice
is never forced, never really rises out of a sort of lazy lull. This makes
the voice sound fragile and isolated. It contributes to the simplicity
of the tone (although the songs only have the semblance of simplicity being
artfully constructed, multi-layered full-scale compositions).
Mercury Rev seem to have a thing about
movies. For a start, the record was recorded on 35 mm film. Although the
music of the band has, at times, something of the avant-garde artiness
to it, the obsession is not only with arthouse cinema. In fact, the whole
album could be seen as a great soundtrack for different types of movie.
The melodies evoke a fantastic ethereal escapism, reminiscent of Hollywood
passions as well as displaying haunting, slightly dissonant qualities that
bring to mind horror, suspense or psychological drama.
The three instrumentals of the album's eleven
tracks are all beautiful and are also revealing of the band's way of working.
"I collect Coins" has a "Piano bar" aspect to it. A melancholy piece that
the band have voluntarily dated by adding crackling noise reminiscent of
old vinyl (unless, of course, that's what it is). It brings to mind the
past, and also the old movies. There are sad horns on one side and piano
playing on the other, both sounding remote.
"The Happy end" (The Drunk Room) is an outspokenly
avant-garde (or avant-rock or whatever they call it) piece. The band can
be "avant-garde" even in the poppier numbers but they're really putting
their point across here. A repetitive piano structure and whine is interlaced
with a haunting kind of gipsy rhapsody. The song is voluntarily dissonant
and all the more evocative for it with its rasping sounds, horns, honking
and blasts. In fact the way of composing seems the same on this song as
on the less "experimental" ones. A simple, repetitive, almost binary structure
that's gradually built upon until it becomes something quite elaborate.
"Pick Up If You're There" sounds both old and
new. On the one hand it could almost be one of those modern ambient soundscapes,
on the other it has a voluntarily crackly and dated quality. Again, its
a simple base, haunting and repetitious and all the other instruments are
built around this creating an inspiring, evocative piece. This voluntarily
simple base principle is also something "avant-garde" and resolutely modern
musically speaking (at least as far as rock'n'roll's concerned). And this
is part of the band's specificity: something at once avant-garde as well
as symphonic and harmonious. This track comes complete with voices at the
end thus reinforcing the "soundtrack" theory. As on many of this album's
songs, the bowed saw makes a noted appearance here.
There's an ethereal quality to a great many of
the album's numbers. A gradual build up from a slow, lulling start to the
booming crescendos that characterise some of the choruses.
"Holes", the opening track, is one such number.
There's a rise of strings, a progressive escalation, from the lazy/lonely
eighties voice to a truly symphonic point. Something lulling, lazy and
laid-back that's built into something intricate and elaborate while remaining
simple. The song has an almost binary, spaced-out base to it. And the intricate
blend of instruments don't blow it, quite to the contrary, but give it
a rising force. There's a gradual build-up and growing emphasis from a
slow starting point. Nothing is overdone. It's just great, and that's not
even mentioning the bowed saw.
"Tonite It Shows" is equally musically intricate.
The song is laid down on a bed of violins augmented by lush, plucked strings
and horns. Again, the slow, fragile voice comes out clearly against the
elaborate backing.
"Endlessly" is ethereal with its haunting choir.
Again, the construction is similar: slow and simple but with added and
intricate musical layers. The song sounds like an elaborate, soothing fantasy.
It rises from its slow simple base into a moving ethereal piece that bewitches
us and sweeps us away. It's a harmonically pleasing piece, it could be
evoking a sort of "magic of the movies" thing. Thinking of other albums
that have that soothing, harmonically beautiful quality the name that comes
to mind is Brian Wilson. Not a name to be
mentioned lightly but listen to the album, the comparison is worth making.
Is this bowed saw part of the plot? Is it Mercury Rev's acknowledgement
of Wilson's talent? Craftily choosing the
bowed saw in place of the theremin Brian made popular with "Pet
Sounds"? The bowed saw stars on this number as well. The song even
breaks into "Silent Night" at least twice. Merry Christmas!
"Opus 40" opens in a crescendo of strings. The
opening verse always reminds me of "All the Young Dudes" by David Bowie/Mott
the Hoople and there's a laid-back, country side of another part that always
seems to make me think of an old "Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young" album
I used to have. While we're in the names dropping thing, the song starts
off slow and binary, a bit like some Beach Boys
stuff and it's safe to say there's a dose of Beatles in there too. The
rumbling, booming, symphonic production brings to mind Phil Spector and…
Brian
Wilson. This shows that the band can skilfully blend all these influences
and musical traditions into their own brand of music. The kind of "down-country"
aspect shouldn't be looked over either.
"Hudson Line" has a kind of "down-country", frontier,
rambling train theme to it. It comes with a shuffling drum "train" background
and a funky Wurlitzer organ (or whatever). Still it manages to have that
Mercury Rev slowness and equally to attain symphonic grandeur.
The last three numbers are a bit noisier than
the more harmonious, symphonic pieces that came before.
"Goddess On a Hiway" is in fact a bit of both.
It has that lazy "down-country" rambling aspect as well as a trumpeting,
intense chorus.
"The Funny Bird" has once again a slow beat and
haunting melody. The voice is sung through a vocoder, or whatever those
things are called, which makes it sound isolated and fragile. Enmeshed
in echo and treble and noise. Still, the principle is the same: the song
moves on a line from laid-back to intense. It could be judged more "modern"
than the others in that it plays with noise more. It plays on conflict
with clashing cymbals, rolling drums, overdriven noisy guitars and feedback.
But again it's symphonic with strings there in the background and horns
sometimes present in the foreground. It has a weird symphonic ending, as
if the whole piece were the soundtrack to something.
"Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp" has more of a beat
to it. An almost "dance" quality. But again, it's a laden song: laden with
instrumentation. It's a more upbeat number than the rest of the album while
retaining a spaced-out, drenched quality fitting to the lyric "washed out
delta sun". It has spaced-out, multi-instrument noisy choruses. All of
a sudden it moves into something totally experimental, as if it were a
totally different song. As experimental music goes, there's nothing new
about it. A dodecaphonic, disharmonic, "John Cage" like quality. A bit
like as if they had to tag this on to show they were arty. Or maybe to
make sure we got the point of their music, of how it was made.