Early promo copies of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs were mailed out to press in a cardboard-replica postal packet, complete with a stamp and a postmark advertising its release date. This was no random act: In 1998, a new Mercury Rev album could have felt like a postcard from a long-lost, old friend. Unlikely beneficiaries of the post-Nirvana major-label cattle call, Mercury Rev initially overcame the inter-band acrimony that fueled their first two brilliantly frazzled albums (1991's Yerself Is Steam and 1993's Boces), only to slip further into oblivion with the more refined but commercially ignored 1995 release, See You on the Other Side. A subsequent improvised recording released under the name Harmony Rockets (1995's Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void) suggested the band was forsaking populist ambition to delve deeper into the psych-noise underground. Aside from a songwriting credit for Rev ringleader Jonathan Donahue on the Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, by 1997, Mercury Rev had effectively vanished.
The arrival of Deserter's Songs on the nascent V2 label was a brow-raiser in and of itself; but that sense of pleasant surprise turned to dumbstruck disbelief once the CD was dropped in the player. Mercury Rev had flirted with symphonic flourishes and sentimental balladry before, but usually delivered them in a haze of distortion (Boces' "Something For Joey") or cheeky, irreverent arrangements (See You on the Other Side's "Everlasting Arm"). Deserter's Songs' opening track, "Holes", however, was something else entirely: Never before had Donahue left his helium-high croon so vulnerable and exposed, and never before had the band's densely textured arrangements been deployed to such moving emotional effect, with the song's eye-welling surge of orchestration and weepy bowed-saw lines perfectly complementing Donahue's crestfallen lyrics.
And while there were always themes of New York state iconography running through the band's disjointed discography-- the Coney Island Cyclone, the Rockettes, Bronx cheers-- Deserter's Songs projected an especially vivid sense of place, casting a set of intimate, romantic narratives against the staggering natural beauty of the band's upstate New York surroundings. Credit producer/bassist Dave Fridmann for foregrounding certain agrarian classic-rock influences-- namely, Jack Nitzsche-era Neil Young, the Band, and Brian Wilson-- that were heretofore buried behind the band's wall of squall; Mercury Rev even went so far as to solicit guest contributions from Levon Helm and Garth Hudson for some authentic Big Pink flavor.
In a sense, Deserter's Songs practically functions as a tourist brochure for the Empire State, with the stirring centerpiece track "Opus 40" referencing both the titular stone-sculpture garden in Saugerties and the looming Catskill mountains, while "Hudson Line" pays tribute to the train route that provides an upstate escape from New York City. I had always written off the latter track as Deserter's Songs' most frivolous-- owing to Hudson's supper-club-smooth sax line and the meek vocal courtesy of guitarist Grasshopper-- but in it, we hear the album's guiding philosophy: "Gonna leave the city, gonna catch the Hudson Line/ You know I love the city, but I haven't got the time."
Deserter's Songs was likewise a necessary act of retreat for a band that had long been defined by chaos and turmoil, and its peaceful, back-to-nature ethos felt all the more radical at a time when the harsh, mechanized sounds of big-beat electronica and nu-metal dominated the airwaves. The album's considerable critical success practically spawned a sub-genre of its own, with subsequent releases by the Flaming Lips (The Soft Bulletin, also recorded by Fridmann at his Tarbox Studios), the Delgados (The Great Eastern; Fridmann again), and Grandaddy (The Sophtware Slump) all hewing to a similar balance of lyrical intimacy and orchestral expanse. And while Mercury Rev's spotty track record since Deserter's Songs has currently driven the band into the same sort of limbo in which they found themselves prior to recording the album, you can still hear a distinctly Deserter's mix of the rustic and the epic in contemporaries like Fleet Foxes, My Morning Jacket, and Arcade Fire.
Hopefully, this 2xCD reissue will serve to raise the band's stock once again, and that could very well be the true impetus behind this package; tellingly, Mercury Rev have chosen to mark their 20th anniversary not by re-releasing their 1991 debut, but rather the record that has effectively allowed them to survive for two decades. Collectors of Deserter's Songs' singles will know that, for B-sides, the band often resorted to its deep arsenal of covers, but none of these is represented on this issue's bonus disc (presumably because many of them were already compiled on the 2006 best-of collection, Stillness Breathes). But we do get a batch of rough yet illuminating demos that help connect the dots between Mercury Rev's experimental roots and Deserter's Songs' immaculate conception. The Tascam takes on "Endlessly" and "Tonite It Shows" sound closer to early-70s Lennon than their more Disneyfied final versions, and the sax-less "Hudson Line" feels much less anomalous in this setting.
Most remarkable of all is an embryonic version of "Goddess on a Hiway", both for its crude, tape-decayed presentation and its original recording date: 1989. That Donahue was sitting on Deserter's Songs' lead single for almost 10 years could be seen as proof of the early Mercury Rev's preference for the anarchic over the affecting. Or maybe he just needed to wait for his band's darkest, most uncertain hour to sing that chorus-- "I know... it ain't gonna last"-- with the conviction and desperation it demands.
