Album Review: Mercury Rev's "Born Horses"
Score: 9.5/10
Like many of all-time favorite bands, I was turned onto Mercury Rev in the mid-2000s via the music news and review site Pitchfork Media, which despite some incomprehensible and erringly ‘avant garde’ reviews was one of the few oases of good taste in a desert of artistically bankrupt popular culture (no mistake that reality TV, boybands, boring, middling alt-rock, and objectionable and often sexist rap music were the by and large the order of the day) and a reliable source of independent or otherwise non-mainstream content in the internet’s early days. By way of The Flaming Lips, whose Soft Bulletin blew me away when I first heard it in 2003, I decided to purchase the 1998 album Deserter’s Songs by this band I’d never heard of but which were often mentioned as a sort of sibling entity to the Lips, which I quickly followed by acquiring their sorely underappreciated 1995 masterpiece See You on the Other Side, and album which sold poorly commercially and nearly ended the band. I was instantly hooked by the quality of the songwriting and the wild variation in styles they were capable of nailing, and Mercury Rev remain my favorite band to this day, an inspiration at more points in my life than I could enumerate here.
Released today, Born Horses is Mercury Rev's first album of original material in 9 years, following 2019’s cover of Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete with guest vocalists. Earlier this year, the first single “Patterns” was released which featured initially somewhat off-putting spoken word poetry as lyrics, sung/spoken by Jonathan Donahue in a lower register than longtime fans would be used to. The single worked though, because the words were fittingly compelling, especially backed by the tight, gorgeous instrumentation and uplifting message. They sell the new style.
In the hands of any other band, this spoken word, almost “inspirational speech” cadence could have been disastrous, and after it emerged that the album would be mostly done in this style, one could have been forgiven for being initially skeptical. A single is one thing, but an entire album? Still, Jonathan and Grasshopper (joined by Marion Genser and Jesse Chandler) have never let me down, so I was still waiting with bated breath for the release, especially with the August release of “Bird of No Address,” which along with “Your Hammer, My Heart” are the album’s probable standout tracks (others, such as “Ancient Love” and the title track are doubtlessly going to be growers). Following the full release this morning, my faith in the band has been confirmed: they continue to evolve well into their third decade of existence with a unique and daring album that deserves to be mentioned alongside their canonical classics like Deserter’s Songs and All Is Dream.
At a casual glance, the themes of Born Horses might be described as: love and loss, nostalgia, and hope in the face of past trauma. But a closer reading of the lyrics reveals an ambivalence about excessively pining for the past and viewing the old times through rose-tinted glasses—was the past really so much better, or in the process of moving on and healing, have we forgotten (for our own good, admittedly) some of its more sinister and unnecessary injuries? On the lead single, Donahue extolls the virtues of patterns, finding that everything old will be new again, but also that he sees patterns “even where they don’t exist.” On “A Bird of No Address,” the narrator laments the loss of a relationship (“I’ve been a bird of no address, ever since the day you left”) and states that he isn’t ready to move on, but concludes on the stirring final few minutes (as close to a traditional chorus as the album typically gets) that from now on, he’ll “fly up” instead, not caring that he’s lost among the clouds. Experiencing the past means experiencing as it was, not as we’d like it to be, and sometimes it’s best to look around at the here and now and to a brighter future. As they succinctly put it on an earlier track, “you gotta start moving on”:
Musically, the album is influenced by some of Mercury Rev’s more outré releases of the last 16 years, from the extended, mostly instrumental and somewhat ambient pieces released as part of the recent deluxe edition of 2008’s Snowflake Midnight, to the subsequent long-form tracks recorded mostly under the name Harmony Rockets (a side project which dates back to the mid-90s). These songs almost live and breathe, unconstrained, happy to take their time and go where the music takes them, steeped in the past and jazzy in an “out of time” way, but with not a single note wasted.
Yet the final product of these late-2000s sessions, the Snowflake Midnight album proper, is intensely emotional and relatively concise, especially singles “Senses on Fire” and “Butterfly’s Wing.” So it is with the new album Born Horses, whose songs feel like part of a grander narrative, a snapshot of life at a particular moment whose reflections of what came before, for better or worse, make us who we are today. And the band has thankfully let us a take a peek into some of these stories, asking us to imagine them as parts of a whole and wonder what might have happened in the parts they left unspoken. Crucial parts perhaps, but just parts nonetheless, like a cagey testimony or autobiography, out of which the narrator has left out certain details we can only speculate about.
An overused but still apt description of Mercury Rev’s music here is “cinematic,” in this case the score to an imagined film of one’s life, the most important film possible to the one experiencing it, yet frustratingly apart from everyone else and their own experiences. As necessarily unconnected viewers we might find some of its moments dull, in the way the recollection of a dream is only interesting to the one who experienced it. The difficulty of making these descriptive connections to others and relating experiences through art is prominent on the album opener “Mood Swings,” in which the narrator wonders where his next emotional epiphany will take him. And if we can’t fully anticipate our own feelings, how can we fully describe them to others?
In interviews, the band has often extolled the virtues of returning to the music of one’s youth for inspiration, allowing it to transport the listener to a specific time and place in the same way a particular food’s smell memory evokes an early Christmas, or something as simple as a great dining experience out. When I listen to music from around this time, it transports me back to college, driving home from class at night on a dark road which was under construction and therefore treacherous, listening to See You on the Other Side and wondering what the hell I was going to do with my life.
These were difficult years as I was in school for a potentially “useless” degree in political science, my mother had just died after a protracted illness, my father had become too sick to work, and my first job (which I had started at age 15) ended with the business’s closure. At the same time I discovered Mercury Rev, I was listening to Holiday by The Magnetic Fields, an upbeat pop album with an intense pathos and heavy sarcasm running through it. I still can’t listen to “Swinging London” without remembering the sights and smells of the hospice center where my mother spent her final days, or even more vividly, the time I bought flowers to bring her because I didn’t know what else to do, despite the bouquet being functionally worthless by then (at the point of dying, time and attention are the only gifts that matter).
As the environment begins an accelerated unraveling due to climate change and unabated environmental destruction, those who are interested in facing reality have mostly resolved to enjoy the time human civilization has left, with the same resignation as a terminally ill patient who knows even painful moments are more precious for their impending end. Life is inevitably fleeting anyway though, and Born Horses reminds us to stop and look around us and appreciate the large and small moments that make up our selves.