“How does that old song go?...”
As a document of a band falling apart, it’s hard to top Mercury Rev’s 1998 opus Deserter’s Songs. Beset by intra-band conflicts and personal problems – the departure of founding member and lead singer David Baker was still a fresh wound, while stories of Jonathan Donahue’s near-fatal heroin habit were legion – the group decamped to New York’s Catskill Mountains to record what all concerned assumed would be their last album. Up to that point, The ‘Rev had released three long-players over the course of a decade that, despite critical praise, had sold about twenty copies between them; no one had any reason to suspect that album number four would be any different.
Fast-forward thirteen years, and the band are in town to give a track-by-track, in-the-flesh run through of an album that not only brought them “back from the brink”, but was also responsible for altering the musical vocabularies of many who came into contact with it. For this writer, it remains the record that steered him away from the increasingly dying embers of Britpop (although I do still have that cassette of The Bluetones’ second LP somewhere…) and on to the cosmic Americana highway. More than that, though – and like a disproportionate number of truly great albums – it sounded like something the band simply had to make.
It still does to this day, in fact, so it’s with a mixture of excitement and slight trepidation that we take our seats tonight. Can they do it justice? Is asking them to regurgitate an album with so much baggage attached not a little too close to the bone? What if Jonathan can’t hit those high notes any more? Luckily, over the course of the next hour all these questions and more are swept away.
Sure, Donahue’s vocal chords may strain somewhat on opener ‘Holes’, but the sense of occasion makes up for it as he intones the song's now-deeply ironic closing line: “Bands, those funny little plans that never work quite right.” ‘Goddess on A Hiway’ and ‘Opus 40’ – both of which, along with ‘Holes’, have remained live staples down through the years – prompt spontaneous dance-offs to break out across the fully-seated audience; it’s the less frequently-aired numbers that threaten to steal the show, however: ‘Endlessly’ is every inch as serene a slice of chamber pop now as it was thirteen years ago, while album-closer ‘Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp’ amazes us all by still sounding so fresh and vibrant, its vaguely Balearic bounce not a million miles away from latter-day Animal Collective. But it’s ‘The Funny Bird’ – a song that Donahue introduces as “a metaphor for the band” – that really dazzles: a wailing, distorted beauty on which renowned producer (and former bassist) Dave Fridmann’s presence is most keenly felt, and the song that most openly wears the scars of its authors' troubled past.
Throughout the performance, various reminiscences are aired – most memorably a tragi-comic tale of master tapes being left behind in a taxi – and we’re wryly informed that Deserter’s Songs “paid for one or two trips to rehab.” And then, before we know it, it’s finished, prompting Ragged Words to instinctively reach for the repeat button.
What we get instead is a celebratory encore that includes a cover of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill’ along with ‘The Dark Is Rising’ from 2001’s All Is Dream (a spiritual successor to Deserter’s... in this fan's view) and, bringing us bang up to date, a white-light motorik storm through ‘Senses On Fire’, one of the band’s most recent singles.
New material is rumoured to be on the way, but for now this victory lap feels both well-deserved and well above the plodding, going-through-the-motions nostalgia rock that certain 'middle-aged' bands are guilty of peddling. It may not have been the original plan when the band retreated to the hills all those years ago, but it definitely looks to have worked quite right.
Photo by Mark Earley. To view a full gallery of his shots, go here.
