Forty Five Minutes Of Mercury Rev

Mercury Rev had a brief flurry of fame/ renown in 1989- 1991, often in conjunction with fellow travellers The Flaming Lips. In 1993 founder member David Baker left the group and Jonathan Donohue and Sean Grasshopper Mackowiac carried on, playing experimental psychedelic rock until they collapsed in 1996/7. Grasshopper retreated to a Jesuit guest house in upstate New York while Donahue sat around listening to children's music and playing melodies on a piano. He was invited to play with The Chemical Brothers on the track that became The Private Psychedelic Reel and when he returned to the US contacted Grasshopper and from all the wreckage- debt, psychedelic and experimental rock that made them a cult band but seemed to be bus constantly hurtling out of control, drugs, lost members and management, depression, broken relationships- they regrouped in the Catskill Mountains pulled the songs that became Deserter's Songs into being. Deserter's Songs is one of the best albums of the 90s, a heartfelt, concise, weirdly affecting record that harks back to the songs of the 1930s and '40s. It also featured a pair of musicians from The Band, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson. Garth died two weeks ago, the last survivor of the men who made Big Pink. 

RIP Garth Hudson.

Last year Mercury Rev released an album called Born Horses, an album I bought and which divides me- half of it I don't like at all, easy listening pastiche with Donahue abandoning his upper register  singing for something deeper and half of it I really like, a few genuinely revelatory songs a bout birds and horses that are like nothing else. 

For this Sunday mix I've focussed mainly on the years 1998- 2004 and the trio of albums they made in those years- Deserter's Songs, 2001's stunning All Is Dream and 2004's mixed bag The Secret Migration. These three, well the first two, are albums that everyone should own and which bear repeat playing. I don't know if the end of the century/ millennium things was a factor in their creation but it seems like a good story, that pre- millennial uncertainty fed into Deserter's Songs, sent them back into America's weird past, and the new century gifted them All Is Dream. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Mercury Rev

• The Dark Is Rising
• Holes
• Observatory Crest
• Endlessly
• Tides Of The Moon
• Diamonds
• Opus 40
• Delta Blues Bottleneck Sun (Chemical Brothers Remix)
• Dream On

The Dark Is Rising is the opening song on 2001's All Is Dream, a song infused with both fragility and strength, in those huge Hollywood strings, a piccolo and Donahue's so human voice. It's a late night, freak- you- out song that in some ways has become mixed up with my feelings about Isaac's death, my grief and especially those mornings when I wake up having dreamt about him. 'I dreamed of you on my farm/ I dreamed of you in my arms/ But my dreams are always wrong', are the lines that hit me. 'I always dreamed I'd love you/ I never dreamed I'd lose you' too. A friend who has been through a similar experienced pointed me to the end of the song though and the last line- 'In my dreams I'm always strong'- and I started to see it differently. Tides Of The Moon is from the same album, an album that closes with the seven minutes epic Hercules which I tried to fit in here too and failed. 

Holes opens Deserter's Songs, a truly stunning piece of music, orchestral pop with a saw wobbling its way through it and Donahue's voice and lyrics, not least the break down and extraordinary moment where he sings, 'Holes/ Dug by little moles/ Angry jealous spies/ Got telephones for eyes', and makes it sound deeply profound. 'How does that old song go?'

Observatory Crest is a cover of a 1974 Captain Beefheart song, recorded for a 2001 Peel Session and included on the 2006 compilation Stillness Breathes, complete with birdsong. 

Endlessly is from Deserter's Songs too. I could have included Goddess On A Hiway instead. Both are highlights from an album packed with them. Endlessly seemed to fit with the feel better, the sound of the 1940s cinema/ 1890s theatre/ psychedelic Willy Wonka/ late 90s alt- rock crossover. 

Opus 40 is also from Deserter's Songs, possibly its peak, tripped out psychedelic/ silver screen freakery with the line, 'I'm alive she cried but I don't know what it means', as fine an eleven word summation of the human condition as any.  

Diamonds is from The Secret Migration, released in January 2005, an album that flirted with Tolkien- esque imagery and which was probably a few songs too long, a song of nature, love and devotion.

Delta Blues Bottleneck Stomp was an upbeat way to end Deserter's Song (apart from the hidden track that came after it), a joyous harpsichord/ piano riff that sounded like they'd heard it on a late 80s house record and repurposed it for an album recorded in the woods of upstate New York by men dressed in late 19th century clothes with two former members of The Band. The Chemical Brothers repaid the favour Donahue had done for them on The Private Psychedelic Reel by remixing it, one of their best. 

Donahue also sang on Dream On, the closing song from The Chemical Brothers' 1997 album Surrender, an album not short of guest vocalists- Bernard Sumner, Noel Gallagher and Hope Sandoval all show up. Dream On is a sleepy, half asleep, blissed out and gently building psychedelic finale, and in some way completes this mix by going back to the start, a dream sequence. It also has a false ending and after a period of silence the song wakes up again briefly.