It's almost like something tuning up, that start. And it was, in a way, because what tuned up as "Chasing a Bee" slowly but surely emerges from a fog of high tones and echoes was something which helped change my life, really. It had to be bigger than just a band.
Suzanne Thorpe, flautist extraordinaire, had it more right than most when she told her mom that she played in a modern string ensemble. Mercury Rev were just so unlike anything I had come across before, all while pushing some wonderful, specific buttons. Perhaps in retrospect the lines are clearer, and yet there still remains something of pure uniqueness at play here. Did it emerge from the fact that the band members legendarily were always at each other's throats? Maybe that's why later in "Chasing a Bee" you hear David Baker screaming and squeaking while guitars drop like sonic bombs and a winsome chorus in the murk sings "La, la, la," time and again, and that's only half the tale. When you consider this was all originally done as a school project, a soundtrack for a film, the fact that this stands so wonderfully well on its own is part of the big secret.
When I first heard about them in 1991, Rough Trade had just gone under in the States. Happily I was able to find a copy of the original issue before they completely disappeared; meanwhile, over in the UK they were going nuts for them, and I was sorely jealous of the fact they seemed to be playing oodles of dates and tours off that direction while coming nowhere near LA (and to date I still haven't seen them, though I've gotten close). In the meantime, I played this mother to death and then some. When the American reissue came out with about seven extra tracks and things, I was in raptures. And all this time later I'm still wonderfully, happily transfixed by this amazing album.
So many wonderful ways around this record. The way "Syringe Mouth" has this big dumb rock riff that stomps on the world while drawling and screaming vocals overlap in the insanity, the way "Coney Island Cyclone" has the line about 'picking up the Skylab, throw it back in space," the way "Blue and Black" is at once a sublime Jesus and Mary Chain parody, only in a way the Butthole Surfers never tried, more in sense of strange feel than anything else, and just sublime on its own, creeping all around with odd rumbles, possessed of a lovely piano break swathed in effects, or perhaps the way "Sweet Oddysee of a Cancer Cell to the Center of Yr Heart" is seven minutes of rolling drums, thunderous guitar orchestrations, things which at once was not anything really mainstream but not anything really indie either, at least not to my knowledge at the time. It packs in so many possibilities, one atop the other, and is never content to sit still, not even as "Very Sleepy Rivers" unwinds ever so slowly, deliberately, a strange viscous drip down one weird spiral.
And "Frittering"? I don't think I heard anything so sad, so crushed, so regretful and lost that year. The way it faded in ever so gently, Jonathan Donahue's vocals detailing somebody, somewhere just wasting time -- and not in a proud slacker way or a contemptuous snarl, just very matter of factly like there was nothing to do because nothing else could be done -- over that steady thump and grind of organs and guitars and electric melancholy -- just cuts, and cuts deep, somehow.
So many bands would take forever to get to this stage. Mercury Rev were just getting started. Astounding.