Seven albums later, Mercury Rev is still rising
Kevin Bronson on
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The music of Mercury Rev projects the world as a fragile and wondrous place, beckoning our imagination to take flight and revel in every marvel of nature, each sunset and moonscape, all living things. It’s cosmic cognizance, amplified, and Tuesday during the upstate New Yorkers’ triumphant return to Los Angeles behind “Snowflake Midnight,” their seventh album and first in almost four years, no nerve ending was left untouched.
At once cerebral and ethereal, the band, performing as a five-piece, mounted 75 minutes of achingly gorgeous bombast, mixing “Snowflake’s” electro-conceived material with synthy arrangements of orchestral favorites from their catalog. Jonathan Donahue, elfin grin hardly leaving his face, played conductor as well as frontman, balancing precariously on one leg with arms outstretched during the tender, anticipatory moments and thrashing about during big stuff. And there was plenty of that.
I swear I saw the El Rey Theatre’s chandeliers getting dewy when the quintet unleashed the Brobdingnagian swell that opens 2001’s “The Dark Is Rising.” That was the first of a two-song encore — the second was the new single, the trancey “Senses on Fire.” Think of it as house music for people who read Thoreau.
The encroachment of monster beats and searing synths into Mercury Rev’s music might have surprised those in the half-full house who walked in with fond memories of the albums “Deserter’s Songs” (1998) and “All Is Dream” (2001). But the new (like opener “Snowflake in a Hot World”) was sewn into the old (like “Holes”) to create a fabric that blanketed the faithful in warmth. Somehow, neither the bedazzling light show nor the video montages (with their subtitled aphorisms) seemed over the top, even if they did flirt with sensory overload.
It was the kind of memorable performance suited for the desert expanses of Coachella, and when a friend reminded me afterward that Mercury Rev played a (somewhat problematic) set there in 2005, I thought aloud, and he agreed, that maybe a return invitation is in order.
Opener Imaad Wasif struggled to gain any momentum in front of a thin crowd, but the L.A. singer-guitarist and his trio showed he has strong command of his dark psychedelia.
||| Stream: “Senses on Fire”
That was an amazing show last night. It was like watching Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat…only Jonathan Donahue plays the lead.
That show was a totally unexpected, quasi-religious experience for me. Tied easily with the Verve and Spiritualized for my favorite shows of this year! Talk about a natural high! Coachella redux, yes indeed, bring it!