Mercury Rev

“I’ve come to love the highs and lows,” warbles Jonathan Donahue reedily, as thunderclap drums and wailing organ squall around him, “When in the end, you’re just a band…”

An apposite tune with which to begin: it’s ‘The Funny Bird’, a wracked lament from the album Mercury Rev thought would be their last, a self-administered eulogy written while mourning their own imminent demise, while waving goodbye, not saying hello. In the process of anticipating their own bereavement, of course, they accidentally wrote their first masterpiece and utterly redrew the map of skewed Americana, then survived the ensuing promotional purgatory and several more personal losses to write All Is Dream, its strange, unearthly-beautiful follow-up. So tonight is a celebration, an effusive, full-on wake following the funeral for Mercury Rev that never happened, not to mention the one for Jack Nietzsche that actually did – and they barrel through their breathtaking catalogue like their beloved Hudson Line itself.

…But something is missing. After having spent their last two albums staring at cloudshadows in the Catskill skies, reimagining the history of American music from music hall to psychedelia, pocking it carefully through with their own fragile yearnings and maudlin humour, graphing out their very own half-mythic, half dreamed-of topography - after all this, their live manifestation, with depressing irony, finds them retreating to a much more conventional place altogether, knocking brusquely through their own spiderwebs, waking themselves from their own lucid dreaming. And as they careen through (what you thought was) the lonely elegy of ‘The Dark Is Rising’, you realise that it’s not the angel-choruses and huge mountain-vista orchestration that you miss, not the wiggly saw and cherubim and seraphim, but the fragility with which these dream-visions are allowed to glow and flicker on record: those strange, bittersweet gifts brought back for us from years spent in the shady border territory between magic and loss.

We’ve come to love the highs and lows as well, you see; and tonight, they’re just a band. ‘Nite And Fog’ said it best. “Vampires want darkness/Monsters want souls/Spiders want corners…” but we want it all.