MERCURY REV
See You On the Other Side
Work
Rating - 7
Optimism, in music, is a tricky proposition. At all costs one must swerve past the danger zones of "jaunty" and "upful" in order to hit the right note of joy. Mercury Rev always pulls it off. Like the Can of Soon Over Babaluma and Future Days, Mercury Rev's densely woven, richly melodious neo-psychedelia sounds like nature rejoicing in its own existence, efflorescing for the sheer arbitrary splendor of it.
The departure of tempestuous singer David Baker has clearly had the effect of banishing the last vestiges of the "dark side" from the Rev universe. Mercury Rev's debut LP, Yerself Is Steam, had its sinister moments, but the sequel, Boces, was glad all over. See You On the Other Side is even more rhapsodic and enchanted with itself. The titles tell the whole story: "Young Man's Stride," "Sudden Ray of Hope," "Racing the Tide," "A Kiss From an Old Flame (A Trip to the Moon)," "Peaceful Night." Normally such relentless positivity would have me cringing, but Mercury Rev's music sounds lightheaded, not lighthearted. It makes you feel as if you've got helium in your blood.
With Suzanne Thorpe's lepidopteran flute, and the rich palette of horns, strings, keyboards, and other non-rock hues with which the band augments its effects-wracked guitars, Mercury Rev often recalls such flower-power minor legends as Beacon Street Union and the United States of America, or indeed the legendary Love. But acid rock is only one of many sources: "Sudden Ray of Hope" has the "just brushed freshness" and fragrant harmonies of psychedelic-era easy listening, while "Everlasting Arm" is at once sentimental and monumental, a wedding-cake colossus of echo-chambered fiddle, drunken brass band, ice-rink organ, and one-finger piano.
Side two (whichever format you get, See You is definitely an LP, if you know what I mean) is stranger and stronger still. "Racing the Tide" is a mystic rush of euphoria, as Jonathan Donahue intones wide-eyed: "I'm so close / I'm almost inside / It won't be long / Before the mystery is mine." A Spanish trumpet (on loan from Tim Buckley's "Starsailor") erupts, and the song glides straight into "Close Encounters of the 3rd Grade": boho-disco a la Buckley's "Greetings From L.A." "A Kiss From an Old Flame (A Trip to the Moon)" is just a little too kooked-out, but "Peaceful Night" is lovely, graced by an arrangement as wonky as the orchestration on Big Star's Third, but unshadowed by despair.
Some sulky Revheads complain that the band, sans Baker, has lost its edge. But See You proves that affirmation doesn't automatically equal "asinine."
SIMON REYNOLDS