Mercury Rev: All Is Dream : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Love them, or run screaming from the room when their distinctively coy, eerie music washes from the speakers, Mercury Rev are a genuine acquired taste. These Buffalo, New York, experimentalists' fifth album is their most precise work yet - it's both musically decorous and lyrically savage, a collection of half-remembered nightmares and fugitive observations linked by grandiose arrangements. Mercury Rev are often tagged as making soundtrack-y music - perhaps for a harrowing, pretentious indie movie. But it's really pop music with its components drawn out to the furthest fringes so that nothing is easily recognizable. Texture and tone - thanks to theremin, Mellotron and other sonic oddities - swamp the conventional musical structure and the probable subject: romance, albeit miserable.

All Is Dream presents no obvious point of entry; it begins with the crashing melodrama of strings and devolves into a repetitive, gossamer-wispy ballad, its melodic line underpinned by simple piano in a different time signature. The track's name is "The Dark Is Rising," and it certainly is, growing in scope and scale around each echoey, mysterious passage. If Mercury Rev's mix of whorling psychedelia and enigmatic lyrics recalls the Flaming Lips, that's because singer-guitarist Jonathan Donahue apprenticed as a Lip, but his freaky introspective tenor catapults this band into sui generis territory. There is beauty here, cold but alluring, on the monumental "Lincoln's Eyes" and the piano-driven ballad "Spiders and Flies." But high-pitched repetition of the music and the inaccessibility of the lyrics means that all but the most seriously baked listener has to work to meet the band on their shifting, obscure landscape.

ARION BERGER
(RS 877 - September 13, 2001)