Mercury Rev: "Butterfly's Wing"

Mercury Rev has never played by the rules, opting instead for a philosophy in which the basic rules of reality and consciousness are meant to be questioned. This aversion to the basic definitions and limits of rock and roll certainly has hurt the band commercially but has also garnered it a loyal cult following. The band’s 1991 debut album, Yerself is Steam, established its members as immediate critical darlings, and in 1998, the band seemed on the verge of super-stardom with the release of Deserter’s Songs, its most commercially successful release to date.

Although widespread public recognition continued to elude the group, the album served as a rekindling of spirits for a collective that was on the verge of implosion due to debilitating drug addictions and long-standing internal squabbling. The album was also a reflection of a group of men desperate to find themselves personally and artistically.

In addition to getting clean, the band signed to a new label (V2), assembled a new touring band in support of Deserter’s Songs, and through spiritual peace of mind finally tamed the reckless energy that had threatened to tear the band apart. With the widespread acclaim of The Secret Migration in 2005 and the recent release of Snowflake Midnight, the band is operating at full speed with a globe-trotting tour and a renewed belief in its skewed, idiosyncratic vision.

“It was a natural progression for us,” Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak says from the band’s studio in upstate New York, as he describes Snowflake Midnight. “Things were changing within the band, so the elements that made up the album just kind of fell into place that way. After Migration, I had started to play with different computer programs, and we broke out our old synth equipment. We were having so much fun playing with this stuff that we just started recording. With us, it usually works that if someone gets a new gadget, it sort of sparks the whole process of writing songs and making music.”

On Snowflake Midnight, the band delved headfirst into the electronic and ambient influences that have always been a part of its sound but have come to define its aesthetic in the last 10 years. Monstrous guitar outbursts have largely been replaced by digital ambiance and programmed beats, though the sound is still distinctly Mercury Rev. “It wasn’t until the last 10 years that software finally caught up with the sounds we wanted to make,” Mackowiak says.

Themes of rebirth and transformation permeate much of Snowflake Midnight, with songs “Snowflake in a Hot World” and “A Squirrel and I (Holding on…and then Letting Go)” capturing the trademark psychedelia and group mentality of an aging band coming to terms with its mortality.

“I think that the album reflects on the band as a whole and on each of us personally,” Mackowiak says. “Being in the band all these years, we’ve seen a lot of changes internally and externally. We’ve seen the music industry change and ourselves change. My father and [drummer] Jeff Mercel’s father both passed away during the making of Snowflake. At my age, you tend to wake up and reevaluate your life and where you’re headed sometimes.
 

"The hippie movement definitely grew out of the Beats, but I think that we share the cynical, questioning spirit of the Beats, and not the New Age hippie philosophy of ‘Everything is great; let’s smoke a bowl.’”

“For the most part, we were in a positive head-space during the writing and recording of the album. The past eight years have been really tough on the country, and now with the economy, it’s been tough on everybody, and I think one of the ways out of these depressions is music. It’s like the writings of [William S.] Burroughs, whose big themes were time and physical travel, drugs, sex, and music breaking through the fabric of everyday reality — not as a statement but as a philosophical question about reality. I think our music is a lot like that, as we try to poke holes through reality and the idea of ‘What is the music industry and what is rock and roll?’”

As a companion piece to Snowflake Midnight, the band has released Strange Attractor, another full-length album, as a free download through the band’s website. “A lot of the songs with lyrics became Snowflake, which we worked on with [engineer] Dave Friedman,” Mackowiak says. “And then Strange Attractor was stuff that we would work on in between, so Attractor became this kind of alternate-universe album we were working on in between Snowflake.”

Despite being available for free and conceived as a project between Snowflake Midnight sessions, the album is a fully realized vision, with eleven tracks of trippy, late-night goodness.

“It’s an instrumental mood piece, really,” Mackowiak says. “Releasing it for free was our little rebellion against commercialism. The Beat writers are definite influences on us. I live near Woodstock, as does most of the band, and lately it seems like a lot of people label us a ‘hippie’ band, and I don’t know where that comes from. We’re not really New Age or anything. A lot of our influences come from the travel writings of [Jack] Kerouac or [Allen] Ginsberg and the sort of transformation of spirit through your own senses. We don’t really buy into the New Age kind of hippie movement. The hippie movement definitely grew out of the Beats, but I think that we share the cynical, questioning spirit of the Beats, and not the New Age hippie philosophy of ‘Everything is great; let’s smoke a bowl.’”

Although the band has never shied away from the exploration of altered perceptions, when co-founder/vocalist/guitarist Jonathan Donahue’s experimentation with heroin quickly spiraled into full-blown addiction, it caused the band to splinter in the mid-’90s, following the release of See You on the Other Side in 1995.

In 1997, Donahue and Mackowiak reconvened in the Catskill Mountains to begin work on Deserter’s Songs, utilizing the neighboring talent of Garth Hudson and Levon Helm from The Band, who appear on the album. Deserter’s Songs was an attempt to reconcile long-festering bitterness, and a chance to examine the disparate personal journeys of the past two years. It was also an opportunity to try on a stripped-down, rootsier approach to music and strip away the psychedelic gluttony that had begun to clutter the band’s sound.

“Before the album, Jonathan and I had a real tension going on, and people were screwed up on drugs,” Mackowiak says. “Attending a Jesuit monastery was the chance to take myself out of the equation for a month. It was a chance to have daily tasks, but not really think about anything and clear my mind. What I got out of it was taking a timeout from music and clearing my mind of all clutter. You’re supposed to be doing prayers while you’re there, which I didn’t do, but they were very loose and open to all kinds of spirituality. I wasn’t really practicing meditation, but the isolation and removal from society was enough meditation.”

Mercury Rev has seen its share of success and failure, highs and lows, and everything that comes now is viewed as a bonus.

“Our first album, Yerself Is Steam, starting doing really well in the press when it came out, so we had to get together and play a show, and we’d never really played live,” Mackowiak says. “It all started happening so fast, and our second gig ever was The Reading Festival in front of 20,000 people. One of our first gigs was opening for Bob Dylan. I was pretty freaked out. This was the Dylan period when he was wearing sweatshirts with the hood up, and I’m on stage playing and I look over and there’s Dylan hanging in the wings, kind of hunched over, wearing the hood, and I just totally lost it.

“But all that early success just makes me realize how lucky we are. We’ve always felt like outsiders, and I think it’s because what we bring to rock is not just rock and roll. Our interest in jazz, Delta blues, and electronic is all valid for us, and in our over-exuberance, we try to cram it all into what we think is rock and roll. I think sometimes it’s helped us and sometimes it’s hurt us, but it’s what we do. Everything that’s happened to us after age 30 has been a bonus, because we all thought we’d be dead by 30. Every album and every tour is a bonus.”

BK-One is best known as the DJ for Brother Ali and as a mainstay of the Rhymesayers roster. But with the help of beat-making buddy Benzilla, he has further established a name for himself through Rádio do Canibal.

An A-list collaboration with top-tier MCs, Rádio do Canibal is built on a foundation of grooving bass lines and horns. This sets a funky foundation for the crux of the album, BK-One’s playful commingling of samba and bossa nova samples with hip-hop beats (which is directly influenced by his frequent travels through Central and South America).

The MCs, notably P.O.S, Haiku D’Etat, Slug, and Blue Oriny, provide plenty of highlights, although Murs provides a particularly crass lowlight in “Eighteen to Twenty.” Regardless, it’s an all-star lineup, and with additional cameos from Ali, Black Thought, Raekwon, and The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, one would do well to pick this up.

Air: Love 2 (Astralwerks)

Despite variances in style from album to album, Air’s sound is easily discernible to most anyone who is familiar. It’s spacey, synthesized yet organic, and holds a reverence for the squiggly electronic sounds of the late 1970s.

Love 2 is no different in this regard, but it may be the French duo’s most realized creation. A combination of delicate instrumentals and pseudo-sultry ballads comprise the album, which calls upon the duo’s usual armaments in addition to spots of saxophone, marimba, and glockenspiel.

Air won’t be mistaken for holding prog-rock virtuosity, but Love 2 displays some of the best “chops” of any Air album, as best evidenced by the deft piano play and swirling guitar solo of “Tropical Disease.” If you enjoy Air, the duo’s latest album won’t let you down.

A Place to Bury Strangers: Exploding Head (Mute)

After a much-hyped self-titled debut, A Place to Bury Strangers continues to perfect its sound on Exploding Head, its first release for Mute.

The album holds a hard-hitting post-punk /new-wave sound that combines the atmospherics and fuzziness of My Bloody Valentine with the rawness of Sonic Youth and the moodiness of Joy Division. Echoed, whammied chords wash over feedback, speed-picked single-note riffs, and über-reverberated, ride-heavy rock beats.

The result is a sound that is much denser than one would imagine from a rock trio. Undoubtedly, the stars of the album are Oliver Ackermann’s customized guitar pedals, which he manufactures for his own company, Death by Audio.

Honorable mentions:

Bellini: Precious Prize of Gravity (Temporary Residence)
The Black Heart Procession: Six (Temporary Residence)
Califone: All My Friends are Funeral Singers (Dead Oceans)
Betty Davis: Nasty Gal and Is It Love or Desire (reissues — Light in the Attic)
Horse the Band: Desperate Living (Vagrant)
Jason Stein’s Locksmith Isidore: Three Less Than Between (Clean Feed)

Twelve Cups Records, the new label run by avant-garde violinist Carla Kihlstedt, has issued its first release. Titled Ravish (and Other Tales for the Stage), the album is a collection of music for theater and dance written by Kihlstedt, bassist Dan Rathbun, and drummer Matthias Bossi — each a member of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.

The Dillinger Escape Plan has hired Billy Rymer (of The Rivalry) as its new drummer, replacing Gil Sharone, who will resume focusing on Stolen Babies with his brother Rani.

Beautiful electro-acoustic duo Lymbyc Systym begins a European tour today.

The Alex Skolnick Trio, an experimental jazz group led by Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick, has announced a short series of show dates, mostly in California. Skolnick's trio focuses on original pieces but also includes jazz renditions of rock and metal songs, including Testament's "Practice What You Preach."

After performing in France on New Year's Day, risque music/dance troupe Extra Action Marching Band returns to the Bay Area to play at The Uptown in Oakland on January 24.

Rock cellist Helen Money (the solo moniker of Alison Chesley) just finished a new album at Electrical Audio. Details of its release are forthcoming.

Video-game/metal experimentalists Horse the Band will begin recording a new album in March, likely with Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart at the boards. The album should be released in May or June on an unrevealed new label.

One of jazz saxophonist Ken Vandermark's upcoming recordings is a disc of live and studio improvisations with German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. The group, Sonore, will have the album released in fall of 2009 on an undetermined label.

The request of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) to appeal the retrial of Jammie Thomas has been denied. Thomas was deemed liable for $222,000 in damages in 2007 for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa, but the same judge ruled months ago that the initial case was a mistrial. A new trial is set for March 9.