Mercury Rev: The Light In You

It’s been seven years since Mercury Rev's last album, and even by this long-suffering band’s standards, the ensuing period was tumultuous. When we last heard from them, they seemed to be tentatively stepping away from their Catskills-scaled orchestro-rock on 2008’s Snowflake Midnight and its ambient companion piece Strange Attractors. And more recently, they revisited their avant-garde film-school roots, performing live improvized soundtracks to screenings as the Cinematic Sound Tettix BrainWave Concerto Experiment. But given the recent upheaval in Donahue and Mackowiak’s personal lives, The Light on You finds Mercury Rev taking comfort in the familiar. The band spent much of 2011’s touring behind a deluxe reissue of Deserter’s Songs, and, in many respects, that campaign continues here. But on The Light In You, the proverbial deserters throw themselves a celebratory homecoming after years in the wilderness.

The album charts a gradual, linear journey from darkness to light, with the first half featuring the weightiest, most affecting songs the band has produced since 2001’s (vastly underrated) All Is Dream. For the first time in Mercury Rev history, bassist/producer Dave Fridmann was not involved in the recording, but after 25 years of working with him, Donahue and Mackowiak have a pretty firm grasp on how recreate his seismic sound. So even if the opening "Queen of Swans" begins as typically twee Donahue ode to a mythical goddess, its helium-huffing chorus is followed by a rupture that sounds like an orchestra tumbling into a fault line.

While that song serves as a reintroduction to Mercury Rev’s symphonic might, they wield it to more devastating effect on "Amelie", where mounting string swells accompany a junkie’s plea for forgiveness ("I’ll break the habit/ it’s my last score") that seems destined to go unanswered; the gorgeous, ELO-esque sweep of "You’ve Gone With So Little For So Long" doesn’t gloss over the tale of impoverished hardship couched within. And with the six-minute epic "Central Park East", Mercury Rev provide a staggering reminder of what made Deserter’s Songs so captivating: They conjure a sense of intense isolation amid vast, breathtaking vistas. It’s the sort of song that’s intimate enough to let you see the cold breath coming from the mouth of Donahue’s park-prowling protagonist, while expansive enough to conjure the glow of the skyscrapers surrounding him.

But The Light in You eventually lets go of urban tensions to revel in the psychedelia of nature. Delivering the sundazed serenades "Coming Up for Air" and "Autumn in the Air", Donahue sounds like someone who can get a contact high just from watching the leaves fall. On the latter track, he sings, "I guess this must be what it’s like/ to be in Beatle George’s mind,"  which actually proves to be a relatively subtle namedrop compared to what follows.

In what might be the most bizarre turn in this band’s disjointed trajectory, The Light in You’s final third sees Mercury Rev refashion themselves as the house band on some alternate-universe ’60s teen dance show, complete with exuberant brass fanfares, sitar accents, and bongo-powered go-go-dancer breakdowns. In their time, Mercury Rev have covered enough oldies-radio standards to fill several jukeboxes, but here Donahue practically turns into a pitchman for a Time-Life box set—on "Are You Ready," he’s getting down to The Rascals and The Pretty Things and episodes of Shindig! and Solid Gold; "Rainy Day Record" awkwardly extols the life-changing virtues of listening to misanthropic ’80s post-punk on vinyl in the context of a cheery paisley-soul romp. (Even if you happen to enjoy Jonathan Donahue, rap music, and The Fall, you don’t need to hear Jonathan Donahue rapping about The Fall.) In light of all this band has gone through over the years, it’s understandable that they’d want to let loose, have some fun, and reconnect with the feeling of discovering a favorite band for the first time. But as The Light in You’s dichotomous halves prove, Mercury Rev are much better at being trippy than being groovy.