MOJO WORKING
“EACH VOCAL was recorded as a recitation standing on the banks of the Hudson River,” says Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev’s latest. “That’s why you can hear steamboats going by and dogs barking.” Back on radar after their 2019 re-imagining of Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete and their cosmic-psych side-project Harmony Rockets’ 2018 instrumental set Lachesis/Clotho/Atropos, the Rev go spoken-word on their new LP. “We are again out of step with a pop-orientated world, and that can lead to some sleepless nights,” notes Donahue. “We’re just being ourselves, but you worry you’ll get buried under the TikTok and Spotify avalanche.”
Largely recorded over the last year at the band’s Catskills studio, the record was mixed by Peter Katis (The National; Interpol). Working amid such treasured totems as the piano Rev guitarist Grasshopper acquired from Donahue’s elementary school and the painting which adorned the cover of 2001’s All Is Dream, they didn’t rush. “People want to hear you did it in two weeks and it came magically out of the clouds,” says Donahue. “Maybe we are archaic in this idea, but time is a fullyfledged member of this band. Some of these recordings took a while to reveal themselves, almost like a desert wind blowing sand off an old stone formation.”
Father Time aside, other players include Mercury Rev’s new, Austrian-born keyboardist Marion Genser, who brings some of Vangelis’s “faded Polaroid ambience”, and Jesse Chandler on “heavily reverbed, almost abstract” piano and saxophone. Martin Keith’s upright bass and Chandler and Grasshopper’s sometimes real, sometimes synthesized horns bring a dead of night, psych-jazz element, while Jeff Lipstein, introduced to the Rev by New York Dolls’ David Johansen, plays drums.
Grasshopper says creating music around Donahue’s pre-recorded prose poems was like “a Brecht or Weill thing, the words suggesting visuals, and the visuals suggesting moods.” Thematically, meanwhile, the record sees Donahue tap the sometimes revelatory well of deep self-reflection.
“It’s not my diary of the pandemic and it’s not a list of complaints,” he says. “It’s the splashes and ripples that unnerve you before your inner pond finally returns to stillness.
“Ghosts from our musical past seem ever-present,” concludes the Rev’s frontman. “At times it feels like Hamlet or Macbeth. There’s a sense of doubt creeping in. Is Mercury Rev this? Is it that? The song Born Horses is based on fragments of a dream I had, and it’s a wink back to me and Grasshopper feeling different to most people for many decades now.
“At times it feels very
