Mercury Rev
All Is Dream
[V2]
Rating: 8.5
Chicks. I mean, what's up with them? There's one outside my window right
now, down on the concrete, in the arms of some big, oily brute, passive
and seemingly content. But the thing with me and chicks isn't just that
they're virtually always down there when I'm up here. The thing that
gets me is that the guy she's with doesn't know any better than I do what's
going on inside her head. As much as he smiles and nods along when she
moves her mouth, no male will ever truly understand what females are
ultimately up to. I can only guess that she stopped out there because she
was drawn to the sweet pop music dripping from my stereo like an ant stuck
in a puddle of honey.
At least, this is how frustrated hetero males have been thinking for as long
as the thoughts of frustrated hetero males have been recorded. Inked on
papyrus, set in type, expressed in terms of humors, temperatures, and tides,
and eventually grooved onto vinyl, it's a piggish sentiment backed by libido
and ignorance (and more than a little unfair to women). It's also, oddly
enough, a sentiment that's been the motivating force behind a great deal of
beauty, most notably in pop music (possibly the greatest repository for male
frustration ever created). Much of the time, male pop is trying to both
seduce and explain the opposite sex in the same instant, knowing all the
while that one of these objectives is a lost cause.
Mercury Rev's All Is Dream claims its share of pop brilliance by taking
up this position with enormous reserves of intelligence, grace, and emotion.
As long-time Rev flautist Suzanne Thorpe-- who's been with the band since
their sprawling psych-noise days-- has been demoted to the orchestra pit for
this release, the band is now all-male. With Dave Fridmann mainly taking the
role of expert producer (and making contributions on bass and mellotron) and
Jimy Chambers passing the sticks on to new drummer Jeff Mercel, the core
group is possibly the most stripped-down line-up in Mercury Rev's 10-year
recording history. Though their approach hasn't changed from the radically
orchestral turn of 1998's Deserter's Songs, these songs are far more
personal than their last set.
Even when bathed in Jonathan Donahue's constant wash of fever-dream lyrics,
it's clear that these are Mercury Rev's first real (though predictably odd)
love songs. "If God moves across the water/ Then the girl moves in other
ways/ And I'm losing sight of either," he sings in "Nite And Fog," his
collapsing love story gently suspended above its lyrical melancholy by the
song's flowing strings and Fridmann's buoyant bassline. Throughout the album,
Donahue takes the concept of woman as the proverbial "other" to an almost
illogical extreme, funneling oceans of uncertainty into a female form and
turning these emotions out again into uncomfortable reflections on death,
fate, and all of those other nasty things.
"Tides of the Moon" takes a typical image of femininity and transforms it
into a meditation on loss and powerlessness ("The threads that run through
your life/ Hang from your sleeve/ Wind through your soul/ The kind you can't
control/ But wish you could break"), only to come back to the now-unsettling
romantic sentiment, "It ties you to me." But even during all this, the band
refuses to simply wallow in emotion, instead confronting their connections
to pop lyricism smartly.
On "A Drop in Time," Donahue quips, "Her words profane, her mouth divine/ I
tried to sympathize with both sides/ But I was caught, like a floating
thought/ Stuck inside of Leonard Cohen's mind." As playful as they can
occasionally be, though, Donahue's words are always rooted in nagging doubts
and creeping riddles like those voiced by his creaky falsetto in "Lincoln's
Eyes" ("What is dark like a birthmark/ Pulls like a magnet/ Male and female/
And covets like a dragon?").
The music, of course, is by no means as unstable as the lyrics. Where the
band seemed a bit more easygoing and loose in their explorations of the
orchestral-pop form on Deserter's Songs, All is Dream takes
the band's newfound preoccupations in a definite direction. This makes the
music sound a bit overdetermined at times (most notably, the opening track's
calculated symphonic swells), but for the most part, their grasp of the sound
has improved. The dark, driving rocker "Chains" cuts out at exactly the right
moment, and bangs out a few cathartic Beethoven string hits before again
steamrolling ahead. A soprano voice that sobs out the soft prelude to
"Lincoln's Eyes" returns as a banshee-wail in the song's brink-of-chaos
midsection, and the song returns obliquely to this sound in its gorgeous
bowed-saws outro. "Little Rhymes" makes the most from its beautiful pedal
steel lines, accentuating Donahue's melody without obscuring it.
Of course, Mercury Rev don't need all this fancy instrumentation to get their
point across. "Spiders and Flies," a relatively simple piano ballad, stands
as the most affecting song on the album. As Mercel caresses the keys, Donahue
quietly unravels, confessing fears of death and disconnection from the unnamed
female who's been flitting around the edges of the album the whole time. And,
with shocking ease, the band shifts from these depths into the exultantly
dreamy final track, "Hercules." As the song's percussive glee swells
alongside guitarist Grasshopper's transcendently melodic noise solo, it
becomes oddly clear that Mercury Rev has, in some way, come to love this
uncertainty-- just as the pop protagonist can't stay away from the inscrutable
object of his affections, and the pop fan can find a place in its heart for
the erratic motions of a band as in love with music as this one.
-Brendan Reid