Unpacking Big Ears, Part III - Mercury Rev

Continuing our Big Ears' unpacking, this time with the fourth and final performance of the opening Thursday night (we guess we are going to go through this chronologically after all).  To briefly recap, after Avey Tare and two amazing Japanese bands - one improvisational and the other meticulously scored - we heard the main event of the night, the upstate New York band Mercury Rev.

Although it was their fourth LP, we hadn't heard of Mercury Rev until 1998, when their album Deserter's Songs came out, and we fell in love with the album.  For three whole months in 1998, Deserter's Songs was probably our favorite record in the world, playing continuously in our Jeep Cherokee's CD deck.  Having lived in upstate New York ourselves for some seven years before leaving in 1993, we loved all of the lyrical allusions to the Catskills and the Hudson.  But the main attraction was the orchestral, almost baroque sound of the album.  Coming out as it did near the end of the grunge and alt-rock era, the album had a twee vibe to it that was new and unusual at the time and although we had no way of knowing it at the time, was the first harbinger (along with XTC's Apple Venus, Part 1 the next year) of the coming indie rock renaissance of the 2000s.

What stood out to us at the time was the combination of the orchestral arrangements, Jonathan Donahue's Jon-Anderson-on-helium vocals, and the unusual instrumentation, most notably the bowed saw on the song Holes.

 

In many ways, this LP paved the way for later indie bands such as The Shins, Neutral Milk Hotel, Belle and Sebastian, and countless other folk-rock and twee bands of the next decade.  And now, some 20 years later, we finally got to hear them perform live for our first time.

It was telling and in retrospect ominous that they chose to open their set with The Funny Bird, one of the hardest rocking, most bombastic of the Deserter's Songs.  Appropriate, as that was the style in which they played the rest of their songs.  The delicate, twee sensibility was gone and the bowed saws and woodwinds of the album were replaced by standard alt-rock, beer-commercial guitar riffs, with each song sounding like it was trying to be an arena-filling anthem to the 90s.

We were disappointed.  Donahue's voice was still in good shape, especially as displayed on Holes, but what made Deserter's Songs so special to us when first released and still sound so relevant today was replaced by what it stood in such contrast to in 1998.  Imagine Andrew Bird attempting to be U2 to get an idea of what it was like.  Except for distinctive sound of Donahue's voice, we could find any number of local bands who could have covered Deserter's Song with more fidelity than Mercury Rev (and we're not even sure about the voice part - a lot of local bands are pretty amazing these days).

Why they chose to replace the bowed saw and string passages with wall-of-sound guitar riffs is anybody's guess - after all, their keyboardist had a flute, which could have better filled in for those orchestral touches than the generic guitar chords. Couldn't they find a saw player anywhere?  Julian Koster can't be that busy now that Neutral Milk Hotel has broken up.

The stirring guitar-rock anthems, coupled with the nostalgic familiarity of the songs, did seem to resonate with some in the audience, and the band and songs were warmly received by the audience. It wasn't that it was necessarily bad per se, it's just that it could have been so much better.

Having said all that, it's time to say something nice now.  Later during Big Ears, in a set we missed due to schedule conflicts, Mercury Rev restored their art-rock cred by performing a live score to the film Carnival of Souls. Featured musicians for the score included Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), Jim Sclavunos (Bad Seeds), avant jazzman Tim Berne, and Mim Goese (Hugo Largo), so they were in good company.  Their most recent LP is a delightful re-imagining of the album The Delta Sweete by Bobby Gentry (Ode to Billy Joe), featuring guest vocalists Phoebe Bridgers (boygenius, Better Oblivion), Lucinda Williams, Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab), Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star), Beth Orton, Margo Price, Vashti Bunyan, Marissa Nadler, Norah Jones, and more, so they're not only in good, but skillfully curated, company.

We can only hope they eventually take the same curatorial approach to Deserter's Songs someday.