This month, Mercury Rev celebrates the 10th anniversary of Deserter's Songs, the album that effectively rescued the band from oblivion and catapulted them to the frontlines of modern American music, earning them unprecedented critical plaudits, regular festival bookings, and a flood of phone calls for bassist-cum-producer Dave Fridmann's services. But while Deserter's Songs came as a pleasant shock both to newcomers and older fans more in tune with Mercury Rev's anarchic, feedback-blasted early work, the album's orchestro-rock lushness was anticipated by 1995's See You on the Other Side, an album that found de facto frontman Jonathan Donahue wrestling with his band's troubled history (marked by in-fighting, drugs, and major-label woes) and trying to harness its notoriously chaotic sound (which once got the group booted off Lollapalooza's second stage for being too loud) into something more everlasting.
On See You's centerpiece track, "Racing the Tide", Donahue repeats the phrase, "I'm so close, I'm almost inside," and with Deserter's Songs, Mercury Rev got there: A self-sufficient state that allows the band to hole themselves up in their remote Catskills digs and release increasingly conventional albums at their own relaxed pace every three or four years to a loyal fanbase that's willing to wait for them. The dark psyche-rock of 2001's All Is Dream followed, but starting with 2005's The Secret Migration it was sounding as if Mercury Rev had spent too much time on the inside, the real-life dramas and vivid New York state imagery that informed their most resonant work replaced by fairy-tale fantasias and pixie-dusted soft-rock surfaces that, in their quest to sound more mystical, robbed the band of its mystique.
Oddly enough, the new Snowflake Midnight finds the band in a similar position as they were 10 years ago: Jumping ship from a crumbling pseudo-major-label (in this case, V2) to a new home (Yep Roc) and primed for reinvention after a trilogy of albums that pushed specific aesthetics (the turbulent psychedelia of the band's first three albums versus the more symphonic, classic-rock structures of albums four through six) to their limits. Their response to the situation is similar to that of some other art-rock contemporaries nearly a decade ago: in a sense, they've pulled a Kid A by turning down Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak's guitars, breaking down lyrics into mantric incantations, pulling the drumsticks out of Jeff Mercel's hands, and immersing themselves in electronic programming (spurred by experiments with an image/music randomizer program) in an effort to make Mercury Rev, well, more mercurial.
But for Mercury Rev, the shift feels far less abrupt than Radiohead's deliberate anti-pop maneuver, partly because Donahue's childlike coo is still the focal point, and partly because they opt for tech-textures that are more comforting, if not downright anachronistic: The reverberating "Born Slippy"-like piano chords that open "Snowflake in a Hot World"; the Boards of Canada-style ambient swirls and childrens' laughter that form the center of "Butterfly's Wing"; the "Little Fluffy Clouds" synth oscillations bubbling under "Runaway Raindrop". Had they tried something like this 10 years ago, Mercury Rev would've been branded as another rock band jumping on the electronica bandwagon; now, their adoption of these seemingly dated devices feels entirely consistent with their track record of mining the past for unlikely, unfashionable sources, from Dixieland jazz to Tin Pan Alley serenades.
More than anything, the clicked-and-cut beats and fidgety sound effects are symbolic of the band's reignited sense of adventure and mischief, setting the serene scene on glitch-pop confections like "Snowflake in a Hot World" and "Butterfly's Wing" only to gradually intensify their drum-machined pitter-patter into bursts of propellered percussion to rousing effect. "Senses on Fire", meanwhile, is a song seemingly about exhilaration in and of itself, repeating its title over an electro-Krautrock synth bed before Donahue's playground taunt ("ready or not, here I come!") sends the track into ecstatic overdrive.
But the excitement proves short-lived: The cavernous ambience and tribal drum flourishes of "People Are So Unpredictable (There's No Bliss Like Home)" may evoke the 1991 Yerself Is Steam epic "Sweet Oddysee of a Cancer Cell t'th' Center of Yer Heart", but its prolonged, vaporous three-minute fade-out-- followed by the frosty, Vangelis-like interlude "October Sunshine"-- signals Snowflake Midnight's meandering second act. While Mercury Rev's insular nature has allowed them to defy easy categorization and flavor-of-the-moment trends, it can also lead them astray: The slow-percolating synth build-up of "Runaway Raindrop" prepares us for a big pay-off; instead we get a spoken-word trip-hop break. And while the synthetic-handclapped lullaby "Faraway from Cars" would indicate that Mercury Rev are familiar with spiritual offspring like Animal Collective, it also shows they're blissfully ignorant of the fact that Arcade Fire explored the same theme of escapism using precisely the same vehicular metaphor on the superior "No Cars Go".
What ultimately saves Snowflake Midnight from following The Secret Migration up the band's collective keister is the song positioned to serve as its climax, "Dream of a Young Girl as a Flower": The eight-minute track effectively fuses the band's cacophonous, orchestral and electronic impulses into an accelerated percussive surge, before the introduction of string effects redirects the song toward a surprisingly affecting finale. The song's late-game appearance underscores the fact that, while Mercury Rev's latest attempt at reinvention may not hit the mark as consistently as their previous try 10 years ago, its more inspired turns recapture that amorphous, curious quality that made them so intriguing in the first place. And the fact that Snowflake Midnight is being released concurrently with a web-only album of instrumental soundscapes, Strange Attractor, further reinforces the notion that the band's exploratory spirit has been rekindled. In other words, they're so close-- they're almost outside.
