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A big difference between the two bands is that Mercury Rev never were really an explicit drug band,
it was all a matter of sound, a chaotic whirl of psychedelic music that suddenly calmed down with
'Deserter's Songs'. Thanks to that album Mercury Rev are one step ahead of Spiritualized, the drugs
were supposedly gone, and only at the edges of the album one could catch the after-effects: the
loneliness of 'Holes' followed by a sudden sense of joy in life or the cover of the album (a dark
picture of a man smoking, hidden in the shadow). But 'Deserter's Songs' was also a controversial
album in the way it polarized listeners. Mercury Rev, by one of those almost magical phenomena,
probably gained more fans with that album than with their three previous albums combined, while on
the other hand a majority of the old fans were less than happy with the new direction. Myself? I was
somewhere in between, 'Deserter's Songs' never connected with me, it had some great tracks on it but
overall it never came together the way things still sparked when the band played another memorable
gig in Amsterdam.
And so expectations for the follow up 'All is Dream' were kept low, which of course makes it even
more of a pleasant surprise. One would say in such cases: a welcome return to form, but what form? In
a way the template for the album seems to be the highlight of the last: 'Endlessly' - a brilliant
child's dream of a song - but infused with the psychedelic dynamics of the pre-'Deserter's Songs'
era. 'All is Dream' indeed lives up to its title, sonically lengthy guitar solos burn away while
strings break like giant waves, breaking and soaring to the heavens. These are big romantic gestures
somewhere between electrified Mahler and a blissed-out Peter Pan. A song like 'Chains' is the sort of
song Jonathan Donahue can strike his perfect rock boy poses to in concert, lost in a wall of noise
until an ELO-style breakdown takes things over. Lyrically, 'All is Dream' forms a complete
regression to a perfect youth fantasy, not as the horny Oedipal intensity of 'Yerself is Steam' or
the deranged kindergarten anthems of 'See You on the Other Side', but a state of childhood somewhere
between overrunning joy and peripheral fear of snakes, vampires, the monsters under the bed, the
forest beyond the path, or just the dark (especially on the sinister 'Lincoln's Eyes'). A feeling
only made stronger by Jonathan's high-pitched little boy lost voice. Best of all is 'Nite and Fog',
whose seemingly unspectacular "but you want it aaaalllll!" chorus is somehow the most touching thing
I have heard anyone sing in awhile.
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