Relatively-Recent Classics #4: Mercury Rev - Deserter's Songs (1998)

I vividly remember being down the park one Saturday afternoon in 1997, involved in an epic 22-a-side game of football (though, given both teams' tactically naive approach, perhaps "ballchase" would be a more fitting description). One of those games where the majority of the players you'd never met before and likely never see again. (Where did these people come from, and where did they go?). A natural break in the eight-hour match presented itself, so we laid on the grass, picking at the turf.

Talk turned to music; a number of the boys were, through their older siblings' CD collections, gaining exposure to the cool rock acts of the time: Oasis, The Prodigy, Supergrass, Black Grape, Kula Shaker. I was still very much a pop kid.

Two lads started arguing the merits of the just-released Be Here Now. It was the best album ever, according to one - better than The Beatles, better even than (What’s The Story) Morning Glory; the other said it was crap and long (I hope this guy is now a highly paid and respected music critic). He asked me what I thought.

I hadn't heard it, I said. I'd been too busy listening to Green Man by Mark Owen.

Not since the day Miss Henderson joined our school had I seen so many boys' heads turn so fast; sniggers, comments and insults suddenly flying in from all angles (so this was how the Ipswich goalie felt when United put nine past him!). Mark Owen? As in Mark Owen from Take That? What was I? Like a girl or something? "Why are you bothering with that shit when you could be listening to "D'You Know What I Mean", d'you know what I mean?" Why didn't I like real music?

There was nothing wrong with Take That, I suggested, convincing no one. And anyway, even if there was, Green Man didn't sound anything like Take That. It had guitars and everything!

Mercifully, the abuse didn't last for long...In one short, coolly-delivered sentence, my friend Stephen took the heat off me, won the game of Cool Sibling Top Trumps, and killed the conversation stone-dead – announcing that his brother had turned him on to some American (*50 cool points!*) band no one had heard of (*100 cool points!*) called Mercury Rev.

We returned to our game of ballchase.

It was another couple of years before I finally investigated the Rev - I caught the video for their track “Goddess On A Highway” on a late-night music program, and bought Deserter’s Songs after noticing its inclusion on a list of previous NME Album Of The Year winners. There’s an assumption that, during the 90s, the NME championed exclusively dodgy, lairy British groups with guitars (many of them no doubt favourites of the boys' brothers and sisters), but look at that list and you'll find several bold, deserving choices which have stood the test of time, including Björk, Tricky, Beck and Spiritualized. Deserter's Songs might be the best of the lot.

Earlier this month, Mercury Rev performed Deserter’s Songs in full at the Green Man Festival (so significant and influential was Mark Owen’s misunderstood masterpiece that they named this annual music and arts event in its honour. Possibly). I can’t get too excited about the recent trend of bands playing their classic albums in sequence, note for note, years sometimes decades after they were recorded – I prefer my live experiences more unpredictable and visceral, for the songs to do something slightly different to their recorded versions. However, the idea of Deserter’s Songs – such a singular LP, and one which means so much to me – in its entirety on a Saturday night in the Welsh countryside is an inspired, magical one, and I'm envious of all who were there to witness it.

The album is worthy of such revisiting not only because it’s considered their classic but also because it's highly unlikely the band would still exist without it. Prior to its recording, Mercury Rev were very much in the Last Chance Saloon: See You On The Other Side, their brilliant underrated third record, had been a catastrophic commercial flop; they had parted ways with their record label, and both their manager and their long-term drummer Jimy Chambers had departed. Founder members and best friends Jonathan Donahue (frontman) and guitarist Sean "Grasshopper" Mackiowiak (guitarist) were barely communicating, struggling with drug and relationship issues.
They retreated to the Catskill Mountains, 100 miles outside New York City and home of The Band (Levon Helm plays drums on "Opus 40", "Hudson Line"'s slinky sax is provided by Garth Hudson), in an attempt to get their friendship back on track and write and record the next album. This need and desire to escape is touched on in the playful, Grasshopper-penned “Hudson Line”: "Gonna leave the city / Gonna hop a train tonight...gonna catch the Hudson Line / Cuz you know I love the city but I haven't got the time".

"The world wasn't exactly waiting for another Mercury Rev record", said Donahue, which meant that they were free to, as The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne put it, "make the music that was in their dreams". This sense of freedom, of making something purely for themselves, is all over Deserter's Songs. Jonathan Donahue sought inspiration for the songs in books and records that he'd loved as a kid - Tale Spinners for Children, a collection of spoken-word fairy-tales set to classical music, being a key text. His words are full of wonder and vivid imagery ("telephones for eyes", bugs exploding on glass), "streams that flow into your dreams". His voice – high, pure, grasping for notes just out of reach – imbuing them with a naive creepiness, present in all the best bedtime stories.

Psychedelic space-rock - the band's calling card - was, for the most part, ditched in favour of something altogether more classic, quintessentially American ("how does that old song go?"). Ornate assemblages of strings, horns and woodwind take precedent over wailing guitars. The Cole Porter-referencing "Tonite It Shows" has a sweep and grace rarely found in the rock age. "Endlessly" breaks into "Silent Night". Twice.
Jack Nitzsche’s film work can be heard in the LP’s rich string arrangements; a musical saw quivers and wobbles throughout, just like in his One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest score.

As well as a freedom, there is a desolation and desperation which runs through many of these songs - the group believing the end to be in sight. "Bands / Those funny little plans / That never work quite right" sighs Donahue on the beautiful "Holes". "Goddess On A Highway" dated back to 1989 when he was a member of The Flaming Lips, but its chorus refrain of "I know it ain't gonna last" probably never rang truer than when it was recorded here.

Producer and one-time member Dave Fridmann was simultaneously working on Deserter's Songs and what would be The Flaming Lips' breakout LP, The Soft Bulletin, in the same studio, leading to a cross-pollination of ideas, tricks and energies. Donahue played guitar with The Lips for three years and the two bands have followed similar career trajectories: drugged-up hippies to major label weirdos to conquering cult heroes to godfathers of neo-psychedelia. Wayne Coyne often credits Deserter’s Songs and its success with laying the groundwork and preparing an audience for The Soft Bulletin (The Flaming Lips were the opening act on Mercury Rev’s triumphant 1999 tour). With Bulletin and then Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002), they arguably took things to the next level.

“The Funny Bird” was possibly the most astonishing, out there piece of music I had heard up to that point, and it remains a stand-out for me. Donahue's disconcerting, disembodied voice is swept along on the verses - the calm, in-between sections of intense exploding sound, each time detonated by that killer line ("You're the only one I know..."). The careering guitar solos - the second somehow even more intense than the first - are genuinely thrilling and psychedelic, recalling the likes of "Chasing A Bee" and "Sweet Oddysee Of A Cancer Cell" from their debut Yerself Is Steam LP.

When I first bought Deserter’s Songs, I wasn't particularly keen on the three interludes peppered throughout it – they brought a disjointed feel to the record, delayed access to the BIG songs. Listening now, however, they work really well: each one is like a quick nip indoors; respite from the falling snow; a breather from the cruising of highways; the reason for the train-hopping – the desired sanctuary. “I Collect Coins” and “The Happy End (The Drunk Room)” hint at the kinds of backward inebriates you might encounter in the inebriated backwoods of the Catskills.
And when the songs are so BIG, so lush and theatrical, these monochrome moments of comedown and contemplation are necessary: it could well have been sickly-sweet string overkill had “Endlessly” ran directly into the dramatic whooshes of “Opus 40”; the bright, almost rave-like piano of “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp” achieves optimum uplift by bursting out of “Pick Up If You’re There”’s eerie quiet.

Featuring lyrics by Jimy Chambers, “Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp” might not be stylistically of a piece with the rest of the album, but it rounds things off on an euphoric (and, as it turned out, entirely appropriate) note of optimism. In contrast to the distinctly nocturnal feel of the other tracks, Mercury Rev are here "sliding away in a washed up Delta sun". A Chemical Brothers remix was included on the B-side of the single release, continuing a relationship which began with “The Private Psychedelic Reel” on Dig Your Own Hole and led to Surrender’s “Dream On”.

Deserter’s Songs was named Album Of The Year 1998 by NME and Uncut magazine, and featured highly in countless other polls. The Soft Bulletin (1999) and Grandaddy’s Sophtware Slump (2000) followed quickly in its wake: the Holy Trinity of Cosmic Americana. A flurry of alternative US bands were suddenly setting out to create ambitious widescreen LPs (Wilco, Low), being fronted by Neil Youngsters with reedy vocals (My Morning Jacket, Polyphonic Spree), and participating in rustic, back-to-nature Band-worshipping (Midlake, Fleet Foxes). Even some British bands got in on the act (Grand Drive’s sumptuous True Love & High Adventure; The Delgados and Mogwai both summoned Dave Fridmann).

Mercury Rev released their follow-up, All Is Dream, in 2001, and played the Glasgow Barrowlands on the 5^th October that year. It was my first live show not in a giant hall – more specifically, my first at the unbeatable Barrowlands – and still ranks in my all-time Top Five Gigs.
I had lost contact with Stephen, and my friends were going through a deeply unsavoury nu-metal phase, so my gig buddy – as he was for the majority of my early concerts – was my dad.
We were both blown away.
Opener “The Funny Bird” was even more unhinged than on record, Grasshopper wrestling resonant screams from his guitar, the ballroom illuminated by dashing fireflies of light. Donahue, a compellingly peculiar presence, acted out the fairytale imagery of “Holes” and “Lincoln’s Eyes”; his long fingers, flattened-down hair and piercing stare at times calling the Child Catcher chillingly to mind.
A couple of songs in, he disappeared to the back of the stage before returning with his trusty musical saw. He’d found it lying around in his shed back home, he said, raising it aloft to the kind of cheers usually reserved for a guitar hero’s axe.

The set concluded with All Is Dream’s opening track “The Dark Is Rising”; a gorgeous piano ballad with crashing waves of orchestral sound, and the natural progression from Deserter’s Songs. A remarkable piece, even if its power was temporarily diminished due to its nature documentary trailer ubiquity.

After several magnificent rises and falls, the music all but disappeared for the song’s final lines.

“I always dreamed I’d love you, I never dreamed I’d lose you / In my dreams I'm always…”

Donahue, gangly frame silhouetted against a moon white backdrop, threw out his arms and flexed his muscles.

“…STRONG!”

He held the stance, but his arms began to shake vigorously (think a goth Popeye who’s just taken his spinach) as the band built one last giant swell around him.

It was the defining image of an unforgettable night.