Posts Tagged ‘Deserter’s Songs’

MERCURY REV – ” Deserters Songs “

Posted: November 15, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Mercury Rev is an American indie rock group that formed in 1989 in Buffalo, New York. A band committed to experimentation and reinvention, their music has run the gambit from neo-psych and noise rock, lush pastoralism, and 4/4 electronica. In 1998 Mercury Rev delivered the unexpected, a hit album. Deserter’s Songs, the fourth studio long player from the New York-based band not only delivered three UK Top 40 singles, but also struck cultural pay dirt across the globe that still resonates today.

Fully cementing Mercury Rev’s rebirth as purveyors of a cosmic brand of the popular American songbook, Deserter’s Songs is an album of grandiose proportions. Merging jazz, folk, sweeping orchestration, and a dose of 60’s rock, the album was intended as the band’s swan song and therefore made with utter abandon. However, it became the band’s most acclaimed platter and remains one of the essential records of the past 25 years. Deserter’s Songs was released to huge worldwide acclaim and went on to be named album of the year in 1998 by NME, MOJO and many other publications, quickly propelling the legendary iconoclasts into living rooms worldwide and pioneered the launch of a new genre of music, heard today in bands like Arcade Fire and Beirut. Originally released on V2 Records, Deserter’s Songs was chosen as the first release on our new imprint, Modern Classics Recordings. Modern Classics’ Deserter’s Songs is the first LP reissue of this landmark album, long overdue if you ask us. Beautiful audio re-master comes courtesy of co-producer and original Mercury Rev member David Fridmann 

Deserter’s Songs is at once a lullaby, a trip, and a triumph.”
-9.3/10 – Pitchfork (Top 100 Albums of the 1990’s)

“A modern classic.” – NME

MERCURY REV – ” ‘Deserter’s Songs’ 20th Anniversary ” 2 Cd Reissue

Posted: May 27, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Mercury Rev celebrates ‘Deserter’s Songs’ 20th Anniversary with a very special acoustic and intimate performance…

An intimate, acoustic evening featuring many of the stories and songs surrounding the Mercury Rev’s heartbreaking 1998 classic ‘Deserter’s Songs’. Performed in the fragile ‘whisper and strum’ way they were originally written, this promises to be an extraordinary glimpse into the forces that nearly destroyed a band and the strange events leading toward a most unexpected return. Mercury Rev’s influential orchestral rock landmark from 1998 has been reissued in 2xCD form, with an extra disc of demos and rarities.

Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs were mailed out to press in a cardboard-replica postal packet, complete with a stamp and a postmark advertising its release date. This was no random act: In 1998, a new Mercury Rev album could have felt like a postcard from a long-lost, old friend. Unlikely beneficiaries of the post-Nirvana major-label cattle call, Mercury Rev initially overcame the inter-band acrimony that fueled their first two brilliantly frazzled albums (1991’s Yerself Is Steam and 1993’s Boces), only to slip further into oblivion with the more refined but commercially ignored 1995 release, See You on the Other Side. A subsequent improvised recording released under the name Harmony Rockets (1995’s Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void) suggested the band was forsaking populist ambition to delve deeper into the psych-noise underground. Aside from a songwriting credit for Rev ringleader Jonathan Donahue on the Chemical Brothers’ Dig Your Own Hole, by 1997, Mercury Rev had effectively vanished.

The arrival of Deserter’s Songs on the nascent V2 label was a brow-raiser in and of itself; but that sense of pleasant surprise turned to dumbstruck disbelief once the CD was dropped in the player. Mercury Rev had flirted with symphonic flourishes and sentimental balladry before, but usually delivered them in a haze of distortion (Boces’ “Something For Joey”) or cheeky, irreverent arrangements (See You on the Other Side’s “Everlasting Arm”). Deserter’s Songs’ opening track, “Holes”, however, was something else entirely: Never before had Donahue left his helium-high croon so vulnerable and exposed, and never before had the band’s densely textured arrangements been deployed to such moving emotional effect, with the song’s eye-welling surge of orchestration and weepy bowed-saw lines perfectly complementing Donahue’s crestfallen lyrics.

And while there were always themes of New York state iconography running through the band’s disjointed discography– the Coney Island Cyclone, the Rockettes, Bronx cheers– Deserter’s Songs projected an especially vivid sense of place, casting a set of intimate, romantic narratives against the staggering natural beauty of the band’s upstate New York surroundings. Credit producer/bassist Dave Fridmann for foregrounding certain agrarian classic-rock influences– namely, Jack Nitzsche-era Neil Young, the Band, and Brian Wilson– that were heretofore buried behind the band’s wall of squall; Mercury Rev even went so far as to solicit guest contributions from Levon Helm and Garth Hudson for some authentic Big Pink flavor.

This unmissable event takes place at Glee Club Birmingham on 10th December 2018.