Album Review: Born Horses by Mercury Rev

Sonic voyagers return with first new songs in nine years, their sense of magic and wonder very much still in place A sense of magic has always percolated its way through the music of Mercury Rev, whether during the explosive, ragged turbulence of their early years or the grandiose, sweeping panoramas of their Deserters Songs-defined mid period or the gently exploratory excursions of their most recent work. It’s no surprise therefore to find that new album Born Horses, once again released on their new home of Bella Union, is similarly disposed with the band sounding creatively enegised on their first new material since 2015's The Light In You. The album sees the band's two mainstays frontman Jonathan Donahue and guitarist Grasshopper joined by two new permanent members, multi-instrumentalist Jesse Chandler and keyboardist Marion Genser.

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At the outset of Mercury Rev's wild and winding journey, fans could count on the band to deliver musical experiences unlike anything they'd heard before. From Yerself Is Steam's distortion-soaked bliss to Boces' technicolor anthems to See You on the Other Side's subtler psych-pop to Deserter's Songs' rootsier sounds, Mercury Rev reinvented their music continually while remaining true to themselves. On Born Horses, they still have that power.

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Let’s raise a glass to the big swing, and let’s pour some out for missed targets. Mercury Rev’s first studio album of original material in nine years is that rare thing: a work that doubles, even quadruples down on a weird idea, defying marketability or even legibility. The band wrote and recorded Born Horses, mixed and mastered it, then released it, all of which constitutes brash commitment to the bit. There’s something admirable in the fact that it exists, for these are the materials from which cults are built—not the white-robes-and-passing-comets variety but the kind that rescues lost objects and redefines them as precious..

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For a period of a few weeks several years back, Jonathan Donahue would wake up early and, weather permitting, take to the balcony of his house in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, Mercury Rev's spiritual base. Alone in the very early morning still, amid the natural landscape of the Hudson River, he'd press play on his cassette recorder and begin narrating his thoughts: stream of consciousness, time-hopping sketches of a whirling mind reflecting on love and loss, family and friends, dreams and altered reality, a mix of hope and hurt and long-night-of-the-soul ruminations. He had no ideas on doing anything with these cassettes; he certainly didn't think he was writing songs.

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Mercury Rev has delivered their first original material album in nine years with Born Horses. The album is dense, cinematic, orchestral-based pop mixed with ambient sounds and colored by breathy, spoken-word vocals throughout. The group currently consists of long-time member singer/guitarist Jonathan Donahue and multi-instrumentalist Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak and newcomers Jesse Chandler on piano and keyboardist Marion Genser. Things are fluid and sedated, with glowing musical textures coursing throughout the album’s eight tracks. .

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