Picks of 2014

Albums (in alphabetical order)

Avi Buffalo – At Best Cuckold (Sub Pop)

Beck – Morning Phase (Capitol)

Blank Realm – Grassed Inn (Fire)

Morgan Delt – Morgan Delt (Trouble In Mind)

Lee Fields – Emma Jean (Truth & Soul)

Flying Lotus – You’re Dead! (Warp)

Goat – Commune (Rocket)

Honeyblood – Honeyblood (Fat Cat)

Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings – Give The People What They Want (Daptone)

Damien Jurado – Brothers And Sisters Of The Eternal Son (Secretly Canadian)

Kelis – Food (Ninja Tune)

King Creosote – From Scotland With Love (Domino)

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – I'm In Your Mind Fuzz (Heavenly)

The Men – Tomorrow’s Hits (Sacred Bones)

Mutual Benefit – Love’s Crushing Diamond (Other Music)

Angel Olsen – Burn Your Fire For No Witness (Jagjaguwar)

Linda Perhacs – The Soul of All Natural Things (Asthmatic Kitty)

The Phantom Band – Strange Friend (Chemikal Underground)

 PyPy – Pagan Day (Black Gladiator)

Gruff Rhys – American Interior (Turnstile)

Sinkane – Mean Love (City Slang)

The Soundcarriers – Entropicalia (Ghost Box)

St. Vincent – St. Vincent (Republic)

Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams (Full Time Hobby)

Ty Segall – Manipulator (Drag City)

Sharon Van Etten – Are You There (Jagjaguwar)

The War On Drugs – Lost In The Dream (Secretly Canadian)

Jane Weaver – The Silver Globe (Finders Keepers)

Wild Beasts – Present Tense (Domino)

Young Fathers – Dead (Big Dada)

Reissues/Compilations

Syd Barrett – Vinyl Reissues (Harvest)

The Brothers And Sisters – Dylan's Gospel (Light in The Attic)

Can – Vinyl Reissues (Spoon)

Bob Carpenter – Silent Passage (No Quarter)

Jackson C. Frank – Jackson C. Frank (Earth)

Lavender Country – Lavender Country (Paradise of Bachelors)

Life Without Buildings – Any Other City (Tugboat)

Modest Mouse – The Lonesome Crowded West (Glacial Pace)

Pissed Jeans – Shallow (Sub Pop)

Various – Country Funk II (Light in The Attic)

Various – Too Slow To Disco (How Do You Are?)

Tracks (by artists not included in Albums)

 Ryan Adams - Feels Like Fire (Pax-Am)

Amen Dunes - Lonely Richard (Sacred Bones)

BC Camplight - Just Because I Love You (Bella Union)

Blueprint Blue - Rattlesnakes (Italian Beach Babes)

BRONCHO - Class Historian (Dine Alone)

Bully - Milkman (Chicken Ranch)

Eagulls - Possessed (Partisan)

Ex Hex - Don't Wanna Lose (Merge)

Fatima - Do Better (Eglo)

Future Islands - Seasons (Waiting On You) (4AD)

Ibibio Sound Machine - Let's Dance Yak Inek Unek (Soundway)

Jungle Fire - Firewalker (Nacional)

King Tuff - Eye of the Muse (Sub Pop)

Parquet Courts - Instant Disassembly (Rough Trade)

Paws - Owls Talons Clenching My Heart (Fat Cat)

Jessica Pratt - Back, Baby (Drag City)

Pink Mountaintops - Ambulance City (Jagjaguwar)

John Southworth - Ode To The Morning Sky (Tin Angel)

Stephen Steinbrink - Now You See Everything (Melodic)

Taylor Swift - Shake It Off (Big Machine)

Todd Terje - Delorean Dynamite (Olsen)

Twerps - Consecutive Seasons (Chapter Music)

Tune-Yards - Water Fountain (4AD)

Ultimate Painting - Ultimate Painting (Trouble In Mind)

Jessie Ware - Tough Love (PMR)

Listen to the full Tracks of 2014 playlist here

Gigs

 Goat @ SWG3 (28th Sept)

The National @ Usher Hall (10th July)

Jack White @ SSE Hydro (18th Nov)

The Horrors @ ABC (26th Sept)

The War On Drugs @ ABC (8th Nov)

Sharon Van Etten @ Art School (25th Nov)

Avi Buffalo @ Broadcast (6th Oct)

British Sea Power @ Liquid Room (6th April)

Angel Olsen @ Stereo (9th June)

Static Future @ King Tuts (13th Feb)

Choice Tunes of 2014

  

2014 is nearing its climax and, musically speaking, it's been another brilliant year. Not a vintage one, perhaps, especially in comparison to last time around, but still very, very good. More than enough weird, wonderful and walloping sounds to get the ears around and the teeth into.

Below is a playlist of 140 top tunes from 2014, the songs that have soundtracked my year: singles, teaser tracks, stand-out album cuts. My half-term report has more doubled in size without any let-up in quality. Still, there'll almost certainly be a few tracks that have slipped through the net that I'll later wish I'd included. Some favourites aren't available on Spotify (special shout-outs to Wand's "Flying Golem" and Jessica Pratt's "Back, Baby"!) - needless to say, "Shake It Off" and "Style" would have been duking it out for inclusion if Taylor hadn't taken them down. Think of the royalties she's now gonna miss out on!

What we do get is a healthy dose of transporting psychedelia, by turns exploratory (Morgan Delt, Circulatory System), heavy (Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, Bo Ningen), lilting (Soundcarriers, Gulp) and cosmic (Jane Weaver, Damien Jurado). Modern takes on the soulful (Lee Fields, Fatima), funky (The Budos Band, Jungle Fire) and jazzy (Badbadnotgood, Taylor McFerrin) feature, as well as thrilling rock’n’roll in all its cocky, punk-y and drone-y forms (Zig Zags, Eagulls, Hookworms).

Classic rock songwriting is represented by established artists including Beck, Ryan Adams, Sun Kil Moon and Sharon Van Etten, as well as relative newcomers like Angel Olsen and Blueprint Blue. Pop pops up: wonky dance-pop (Metronomy, La Roux), parping prog-pop (St. Vincent, tUne-yArDs), irresistible power-pop (Ex-Hex, Pujol), and the simple beautiful truthful pop that all-too-rarely disturbs the Top 40 (Wild Beasts, Future Islands, Pure X).

Singles from upcoming albums by Viet Cong, BC Camplight and Natalie Prass confirm that 2015 is in safe hands. On top of this, there are San Franciscan oddballs (Thee Oh Sees, Dylan Shearer), Pitchfork-approved electronic acts (Todd Terje, East India Youth, The Juan Maclean), and a whole lot more.

Dip in, shuffle, or enjoy the list in its full 10-hour glory!

This Week I've Been Mostly Listening To...

Vashti Bunyan – Mother (2014)

In a Sunday lunchtime stupor – in no way brought on by the previous evening’s cocktail of gin, beer and red and white wine, you understand – I was catching up on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone radio show.

My guard was down, and “Mother” – in the most balletic, subtle way imaginable – glided in and knocked me for six. A song delicate of beauty, sparse but poetic of language, it speaks of Vashti Bunyan as a young girl, standing at an ajar door, catching the beautiful unaware lady who had brought her into the world in a rare off-duty moment: on one occasion, her mother is dancing, spinning, “briefly unbound”; on another, she is playing piano and singing “songs long learned, so long untuned”. “My applause should have been rapturous”, Bunyan whispers, but, instead – heartbreakingly – she closed the door and “turned, turned away”.

In the subsequent conversation with Maconie, Bunyan said that she wanted to acknowledge the sacrifices that her mother’s generation made – that the opportunities she enjoyed when pursuing her musical dreams weren't available to them. Her new album Heartleap, self-produced at her home in Edinburgh and only her second release since 1970’s evergreen Just Another Diamond Day, contains many more treasured memories and secret treasures.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Cellophane (2014)

Come for the name (just wrap your tongue around those delicious syllables), stay for the tunes. The marvellously-monikered King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have been incredibly prolific since forming in Melbourne in 2011, making a name (again, what a name!) for themselves in Australia’s vibrant psychedelic scene with several idiosyncratic LPs. They've recently been snapped up by Thee Oh Sees’ Castle Face label (a perfect fit) in the US and Heavenly Records in the UK, who’s nu-psych stable already includes Temples, TOY, The Voyeurs, and The Wytches. One listen through of “Cellophane”, and viewing of its accompanying 3D video, is enough to mark them out as a looser, loonier proposition than any of those bands.

Previous single “Hot Wax” suggested that King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard had befriended the “Drunk Girls” at LCD Soundsystem’s house party and led them out into the street for a spontaneous rendition of the “Monster Mash”. Their new album I'm In Your Mind Fuzz is to be let loose on Halloween on blood red and green splattered vinyl. Of course it is!

Viet Cong – Continental Shelf (2014)

Viet Cong - a four piece, featuring two former members of Calgary post-punkers Women - are another act likely to receive more attention now that they've signed to a prominent Indie (in their case the wonderful Jagjaguwar label). And rightly so - their Cassette EP, originally only available at their live shows and then pressed up as a 12", is one of the most promising things I've heard all year - a 7-track demonstration of how to do something fresh with your influences (garage pop, drone, post-punk), be adventurous, and fall with style.

“Check your anxiety, no need to suffer silently” dooms Matt Flegel, and Viet Cong certainly don’t suffer in silence here. "Continental Shelf”, set to feature on their self-titled LP out in January, is their most brooding, oppressively impressive creation yet, recalling Bauhaus (who's "Dark Entries" they covered on the Cassette EP) and The Scream-era Siouxsie & The Banshees. Their most angry too: the verses find Flegel tearing at his hair and not wanting to “face the world…it’s suffocating”; the chorus a resigned howl against the greedy and the selfish with their “fingertips in the fountain”, fondling “liquid gold” as the world falls apart around them.

Júníus Meyvant - Color Decay (2014)

There's something undoubtedly studied about Icelandic newcomer Júníus Meyrant's recreation of 60s baroque pop and 70s folk-soul. However, like Michael Kiwanuka's "Tell Me A Tale" or Ray Lamontagne's best work, "Color Decay" is so beautifully played and produced, its strings and horns so deftly orchestrated, that I can forgive him that. Plus, as I was listening to its autumnal sweep for the first time, Bob Lind's "Elusive Butterfly" came fluttering into my head. Which can only ever be a good thing.

Kevin Morby - Parade (2014)

"Slow Train", Kevin Morby's elegant collaboration with Cate Le Bon, was a real stand-out 2013 track for me, and the ex-Woods bassist clearly works faster than he plays guitar because he's back with another slice of unhurried, classic-sounding rock. On "Parade", the first track from his second solo album, his echoey vocal and diction and the universality of his melancholy lyrics (about coming to terms with the inevitability of death) are the right side of Dark Side Dave Gilmour; the "ba-ba-bahs", brass and "all my friends were there waiting on me" section straight out of a prime-Beatles McCartney piano number. Lovely stuff.

Live Report: The Horrors - ABC, Glasgow (26/09/14)

“Our colour isn't red, it isn't blue, it’s black”, wrote The Horrors’ Tom Cowan upon discovering that his band’s song “I See You” had been included in a pre-show playlist at last month’s Labour party conference. It was an effective and economical riposte. A funny one too, especially if you’re familiar with the Schlocky Horror Hipster Show image that the band had when they emerged from Southend-on-Sea in 2006 (leather jackets and drainpipe jeans; sun-starved skin; Back From The Grave garage-punk, complete with cover of “Jack The Ripper”). A suspicious media suggested that they were over-privileged chancers – playing dumb, feigning darkness. And after witnessing their performance as opening act on the following year’s NME Tour, I was of a similar opinion: a headache-inducing half-hour of confused clattering and illuminous goo-green strobes (this actually makes it sound a damn sight more exciting than it was); thick frenzies of hair and smoke where the tunes should have been.

It took just eight minutes to change many minds. Coming across “Sea Within A Sea” on the radio was one of those wonderful “who is this?” moments: a motorik pulse (a good few years before every alternative band was adopting that Neu! beat and claiming to be influenced by Can), howls of reverb and stabs of wiry guitar which built into a dizzying electric storm; a spooked voice encouraging you to follow him “far beyond the shallows, far beyond the reaches of the shadows” towards “the scraping sky…my destination”. When it came to an end and the DJ revealed it as being the new Horrors track, “who is this?” turned into “that was them?”

Tom Cowan’s comment also recalls a description by 1960s freakbeaters The Creation – one of the finest English art-rock bands of their time – of their own sound: “our music is red – with purple flashes”. It refers to the concept of chromesthesia, in which heard sounds automatically and involuntarily evoke an experience of colour. Red seems apt for The Creation’s particularly incendiary brand of biff bang pow; the purple flashes perhaps the metallic screeds that guitarist Eddie Phillips used to elicit from his electric guitar using a bow. It’s safe to assume that a group of avid crate-diggers and psych-heads like The Horrors are familiar with The Creation, the quote and the concept. 

Primary Colours, the band’s second album and home of “Sea Within A Sea”, was an extraordinary progression from the damp, dingy debut, Strange House. Geoff Barrow from Portishead was brought in on production duties and although he’s downplayed his role, saying that The Horrors knew actually what they wanted to achieve, his ear for fine detail and love of experimental rock is easy to detect in the record’s sound: thick coats of red, blue and yellow layered, swirled and smudged together to create a claustrophobic, breathlessly exhilarating mix of shoegaze, post-punk and psychedelia.
With Skying, the band moved from Primary Colours into Technicolor, their artful take on stadium rock drawing comparisons to The Chameleons, New Gold Dream-era Simple Minds and Psychedelic Furs. Frontman Faris Badwan claimed to have never heard any of those bands and that any similarity in sound was completely coincidental; either way, broadsheet critics, eighties rock fans and Shoreditch art students were all into it like a train.

In a recent interview, the band revealed that the intention for the latest album was to continue their “slow ascension into music that elevates”, adding a glistening electronic sheen, inspired by Giorgio Moroder and house-music labels Trax Records and Metroplex, to their already-airborne alt-rock. When the record was finished, and they were looking for a title that “expressed the sounds that live(d) within the sleeve”, one word felt right: Luminous.

Tonight’s packed show at the ABC kicks off confidently with two cuts from the new LP. The slow building, bongo-assisted intro and subsequent pay-off of “Chasing Shadows” makes it a tailor-made opener and “In And Out Of Sight”, while often overlooked in the reviews of Luminous that I've read, may be – along with “I See You” – my favourite on the album: the prominent yet fluid use of synthesizers on these tracks marking another progression for this forward-thinking band. A handful of tracks on Luminous (“Mine And Yours”, “First Day Of Spring”), while perfectly serviceable, feel like lesser versions of previous highs and, tellingly, don’t make tonight’s set-list.

We are rewarded for our appreciation and patience with two Horrors classics: “Who Can Say” – with its Ronettes-via-Ramones spoken word section – and a moody, magnificent “Sea Within A Sea”. Similarly, later on, mid-set newbies “Jealous Sun” and “Sleepwalk” are immediately followed by a catapulting “Endless Blue” and "Mirror's Image". Crisp, clean strobe tramlines complement the “Chase”-indebted “I See You”, while the terrific “Falling Star” is arguably The Horrors’ poppiest track yet - I can imagine someone like Grimes or Chvrches taking that gorgeous synth riff and running with it into the upper reaches of the Top 40.

In contrast to that fateful NME show, where he was throwing himself around, presumably in an attempt to mask the absence of tunes, Faris Badwan now lets the songs do the talking. His poise and cool is disrupted only by a smoke machine which is positioned directly behind him – at seemingly random intervals, unnecessarily powerful streams of smoke are fired out, engulfing the singer and threatening to force his slight, gangly frame off stage. As the smoke dies away, you half expect to find poor Faris hunched-over, wheezing and coughing.

Badwan's lyrics for The Horrors are rarely as personal or emotionally honest as his work with Cat’s Eyes (the closest he gets to vulnerable tonight is during the crooned verses of “Change Your Mind”): he’s too busy observing the skies and in awe of the vastness of the ocean to be pouring his heart out into a diary entry. But these songs clearly do connect with people. The fact that “I See You” was judged suitable for the Labour conference – alongside tracks by such black-hearts as Embrace, Gorgon City and Laura Mvula – shows just how much light and shade has seeped into The Horrors’ music over the years; it’s hard to imagine any of their early material being considered, let alone chosen, for such an event (though a “Sheena Is A Parasite”-backed speech on targeting benefit cheats would be genius). They produce a Big sound without resorting to the lazy “woah woah-woahs” and “yeah yeah yeahs” of many stadium acts. “Still Life” – while, yes, sounding a bit like Simple Minds – is expansive yet elegant, anthemic without being contrived.

Any other band would have saved “Sea Within A Sea” for last, but The Horrors also have “Moving Further Away”, another fantastic, propulsive eight-minute epic. Strobes shoot like caps of silver and the crowd wheels in formation.
The ABC felt like the perfect-sized venue for The Horrors tonight (large enough for the songs to swirl around and breathe; small enough for the experience to be an immersive one), but it would be no surprise to find them filling stadiums and headlining festivals in the near future. Their star is still on the rise.

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.