Mercury Rev - Deserter's Songs
- FaceOff - עימות חזיתי
- Sep 29
- 4 min read
Written By: Moti Kupfer
Album review - Mercury Rev - Deserter's Songs
Release date - 29.9.1998
Record company - V2
Genre - Chamber pop / Americana
Every crisis passes, the question is how you deal with it when it is in full swing. In the case of "Mercury Rev", the psychedelic rock band from Buffalo, the crisis was expressed in quarrels and a breakup with the band's lead singer David Baker. In addition, bassist Dave Fridmann decided to retire from performing and focus on his career as a producer.
Baker's departure after the album "Boces" affected the band's sound, which changed its direction from the realms of "Sonic Youth" to a dreamy and bewitching dream pop, with the singer's position taken over by Jonathan Donahue, whose broken and thin voice sounds like it blends in a kind of wonderful harmony with the bewitched sound that "Mercury Rev" slowly and confidently strived for on their fourth album "Deserter's Songs", released on September 29, 1998.
This process did not happen overnight, but over several years, during which band members Jonathan Donahue and Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak became addicted to drugs. In addition, Donahue experienced a relationship crisis, and the band managed to release a third album "See You on the Other Side" which failed in stores and led the band to consider breaking up.
Donahue and Grasshopper met as children at a children's camp, both grew up in America in the late sixties and early seventies, every Sunday night they would sit down in front of the TV to watch their weekly Walt Disney Hour which would always open with the phrase "When You Wish Upon a Star" and this was their first musical influence, it would later also influence "Mercury Rev" that was formed in 1989.
It all started when Donahue, guitarist of "The Flaming Lips" at the time, spent time composing soundtracks for student films made by his childhood friend Grasshopper. Encouraged by their mentor Tony Conrad, a minimalist composer and multimedia artist, they formed a band together, joined by vocalist David Baker, flutist Suzanne Thorpe, drummer Jimy Chambers, and bassist Dave Fridmann.
After a little more than a year, Donahue left "The Flaming Lips", and focused on his new band, which initially focused on a psychedelic and messy sound, consisting of influences from Donahue and Grasshopper during their adolescence. Iggy Pop, "Velvet Underground", Terry Jacks, "The Chameleons", and the New York proto-punk band "Suicide".
The initial attempts lead to disagreements and addictions, and thoughts of breaking up. But just before they break it all up, inspired by a children's album and Disney soundtracks using classical orchestrations, Donahue pulls "Mercury Rev" in a more organic and quieter direction.
The style was built on the principle of accessibility, a kind of combination of Disney songs, songs by composer and musician Cole Porter, and dark and gothic film clips by director Tim Burton.
Donahue and Grasshopper secluded themselves for about six months in the Catskill Mountains, New Yorkת where they made contact with two former members of "The Band" who live in the area, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, and over a period of six months they wrote and recorded their last attempt as a band and what would later turn out to be their breakthrough album "Deserter's Songs".
This is an album built from pain, and the shared and difficult experiences that Donahue and Mackowiak (Grasshopper) went through in the period before it. An album that focuses on the two's drug problems, a concept album about separation or distance that defined the idea that in every sad ending, there is hope and joy for the new things that will come in the future.
While their previous albums featured layers of distortion and guitars over the basic recordings, this time classical instruments, strings, horns, and woodwinds were used instead of guitars, and Dave Friedman, who returned to the band, this time as producer, mastered the album onto 35mm magnetic tape, a unique process that gave it an intentionally eerie sound while enhancing the music's cinematic feel.
All of the songs on the album were written in the same six months in the Catskill Mountains, with the exception of the haunting lead single "Goddess on a Highway", which Donahue wrote sometime in 1989 while still a member of "The Flaming Lips". The song was forgotten until it was accidentally found on an old tape during the recording sessions for the album. Donahue was reluctant to work on the old song, but was eventually persuaded by Grasshopper. The song hints at an inevitable apocalypse through ecological disaster.
"Opus 40," named after a massive 57-acre environmental sculpture in the Catskill Mountains, tells the story of a woman, perhaps a girl, scratching her wrists in the pouring rain and collapsing to the ocean floor. The identity of that woman is well-guarded by songwriter Jonathan Donahue, who does not give away any details about her. Levon Helm plays drums here.
On the album's opening track "Holes," Donahue takes us on a journey of his own stream of consciousness and paranoia, backed by psychedelic synths, a slow beat, and bleak vocals.
And here come the sounds of the electric piano and the Wurlitzer sorcerer, as Donahue sings and tells of "The Funny Bird," a funny bird that never lands.
In "Tonite it Shows," Donahue fantasizes about rescuing a woman suffering from poor mental health, and in the song "Hudson Line," which features Garth Hudson on saxophone, we get the more optimistic side, as Donahue sings about the liberating experience of riding the Hudson Line train north from New York City toward the Catskill Mountains.
No doubt! "Deserter's Songs" is essentially born out of loss, pain, and regret, but it also brings with it the moment when "Mercury Rev" through redemption and consolation finds her place, and her home.
Dave Friedman took advantage of his knowledge from the album to simultaneously produce the excellent "The Flaming Lips'" ninth album "The Soft Bulletin", where he used similar production techniques.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
Comments