The careers of Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips have been inextricably intertwined. During their early years both put out guitar-based freak-rock LPs with the invaluable assistance of innovative producer Dave Fridmann, only to put away the feedback in favor of increasingly lush and ornate sounds.
Come the end of the 1990s both bands were recording in the same studio with the same producer—Mercury Rev was busy producing 1998’s Deserter’s Songs, while The Flaming Lips were hard at work on 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. Both took full advantage of Fridmann’s shiny new recording technology, and walked away with albums that would have been unrecognizable to fans of The Flaming Lips’ In a Priest Driven Ambulance or Mercury Rev’s Yerself Is Steam. Fridmann—with the bands’ full cooperation—had pulled a George Martin on them.
The only question to be asked of Deserter’s Songs is: Is it too sophisticated for its own good? The simple answer is at some points, yes. Everything is perfectly produced and elegantly arranged, but there are times when these songs border on the symphonic hackneyed (check out the washes of strings on adult lullaby “Endlessly”) and even worse, Radiohead rips (listen to “Pick Up If You’re There”). The latter is particularly inexcusable; there’s no place in this world for a second Radiohead. In fact, it’s questionable whether there’s a place for a Radiohead period.
But why start with the worst? Deserter’s Songs has a lunar quality to it—to listen to these songs is to ascend into the heavens and drown, pleasantly. “Holes” and “Tonite It Shows” may have enough synthesized strings and meticulously arranged horns between them to offend the sensitivities of Foghat and New York Dolls’ fans alike, but both magically transport you to a magical planet far, far away. Even vocalist Jonathan Donahue sounds like the intergalactic traveler he plays on the video of “Opus 40.”
And speaking of “Opus 40,” it’s the LP’s standout track with its funky keyboard solo and Rachel Handman’s violin and The Band’s Levon Helm there to provide the beat, “Opus 40″ has enough get up and go to—almost mind you—bring the proceedings down to earth. And closing track “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp” is earthbound indeed; it’s the only song on the LP that has its feet on the ground. Sure, it’s but a shadow of Mercury Rev’s anarchic past, but the chaos that erupts around the three minute mark proves they’ve still got some acid flashback in them—unfortunately, after 30 seconds or so of silence, the band returns to perform some Avant Garde symphonic hoo-ha that brings to mind Igor Stravinsky on the fourth day of a cocaine binge.
“I Collect Coins” is a brief instrumental with piano and horns—it’s pretty enough, but it’s not going to make a numismatic of you. Instrumental “The Happy End (The Drunk Room)” features violin and a pounding repetitive piano chord, and like “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp” goes out with some atonal tomfoolery. I wouldn’t call them wastes of space, exactly, but the band would have been better served by finding a single song replacement.
On “Godess on a Hiway,” which in the grand tradition of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” sounds like “Got us on a Highway,” Mercury Rev again up the tempo, with Donahue singing on the big chorus, “And I know, it ain’t gonna last.” “The Funny Bird” features distorted vocals, huge crescendos and some “Grasshopper” Mackowiak guitar work that brings back fond memories of the band’s earliest albums. “Hudson Line” is another LP highlight. Mackowiak takes over on vocals and throws in some raw guitar while he’s at it, The Band’s Garth Hudson plays a prominent role on tenor and alto saxes, and the song has the chug-a-lug beat of a passenger train moving North from NYC to the Catskill Mountains, where Mercury Rev relocated after leaving their native Buffalo.
Deserter’s Songs includes more than enough excellent songs to outweigh songs like “Endlessly” and “Pick It Up If You’re There,” but such songs prove that when it comes to studio gadgetry too much can be a bad thing. You can outgrow a sound without losing touch with your raised-by-wolves origins, and methinks Mercury Rev’s sometimes overly mannered rise into the musical firmament came at to high a cost—put side by side with the likes of Yerself Is Steam, Deserter’s Songs sounds like downright anemic mood music.
Not that I’ll ever stop listening to it; songs like “Opus 40,” “Goddess on a Hiway,” “Hudson Line,” “Holes,” and “The Funny Bird” guarantee I’ll always come back for more. Deserter’s Songs is as far as can be from Mercury Rev’s early work. So what I try to do—and if you feel the same as I do, I recommend you do the same—is pretend they’re the work of different bands.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
