Mercury Rev

The Light In You

(Bella Union)

For all that Mercury Rev’s latest album intimately reflects the friendship of core members Jonathan Donahue and Sean ‘Grasshopper’ Mackowiak, it’s a big, big production, akin to Phil Spector getting stuck into a Brian Wilson pop symphony. Strings, woodwind, harp, glockenspiel, celeste, timpani and so much more are structured layer upon layer, and yet for all the labyrinthine instrumentation, there’s a lot of loose space in Donahue’s singing. Only on the briefest occasion does the music over-emphasise the fey quality of his voice, as Central Park East (“Am I the only lonely boy to ever walk in Central Park”) threatens to feather-float up its own hippy derriere. Everything else is unashamedly gorgeous, delivering musical substance beyond the pretty ornamentation, rising through upbeat pop (Sunflower, Rainy Day Record) to approach the career-defining heights of 1998’s Deserter’s Songs on the free and easy Coming Up For Air and psychedelically shimmering Autumn’s In The Air (with its desire ‘to be in Beatle George’s mind’).

Alan Morrison