For those not in the know, Mercury Rev is an American indie rock band that formed in Buffalo, New York, in 1989. Their fourth album, Deserter’s Songs, released in 1998, is considered their breakthrough album and has become a classic in more modern indie rock. The album features lush orchestration, soaring vocals, and haunting melodies that remind me a bit of a mesh between The Flaming Lips and The Polyphonic Spree, the latter of which formed a few years after the release of this album.
Top Tracks on Deserter’s Songs
The album’s opening track, “Holes,” sets the tone for the entire album. It starts with a simple guitar riff and gradually builds into a grandiose orchestral arrangement that perfectly captures the song’s melancholic and dreamlike atmosphere.
“Goddess on a Hiway,” the album’s lead single, is what originally drew me to Mercury Rev. The song features a driving beat, a catchy melody, and Donahue’s mystical vocals. The lyrics are especially memorable, and the vocal hooks easily sneak their way into your head.
Aside from the two previous tracks, I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the album until I picked up the LP. When I did, the track that had me coming back again and again is “The Funny Bird.”
It is Haunting.
I don’t know how else to describe it. The song’s lyrics are highly poetic and enigmatic, and the instrumentation swirls in a spacey, atmospheric, almost other-worldly sense. I can’t get enough!
Mercury Rev’s Critically Acclaimed LP
Deserter’s Songs received widespread critical acclaim upon its release, with many critics praising the album’s lush orchestration, emotive vocals, and poetic lyrics. Rolling Stone’s David Fricke called it “a classic of modern psychedelia” and praised the band’s ability to “take the shimmering splendor of late-’60s rock and infuse it with a modern sense of experimentation.”
The album was also included in Pitchfork’s list of the top 100 albums of the 1990s, with reviewer Mark Richardson calling it “one of the most fully realized albums of the decade.”
It was included in the book 1001 Albums to Hear Before You Die by Robert Dimery in 2005. And to conclude, I’ll once again quote David Fricke from his Rolling Stone review, “Deserter’s Songs is an album that will take you to another world, a place of grandeur and beauty that you won’t want to leave.”
Here’s me dishing out my album review of Deserter’s Songs by Mercury Rev:
And, if you want to dig deeper into the various vinyl pressings of the album, you can see my copy of the Excelsior Melodies pressing below. Note that as of April 2023, only one such pressing is listed on Discogs. However, after a steep rise in prices of this particular pressing, a fresh batch seems to have hit the market, signaling a 2023 repress of the album.
How Deserter’s Songs Almost Didn’t Get Made
To truly understand the HOW and WHY behind Deserter’s Songs, and what made it such a standout album, you need to know more about the LP from the vantage of a band on the verge of collapse and disintegration.
Yes, Mercury Rev’s 1998 album Deserter’s Songs marked a major turning point for the band. And yes, the album represented somewhat of a departure from their previous noise rock and psychedelic sound and instead showcased a more polished, orchestral one. But looking back further to the release that preceded it, See You on the Other Side, and how it was received will give some insight into what ultimately led many call their breakout album.
See You on the Other Side was essentially a commercial failure. The album received mixed reviews, and several band members left the group after its release. The band itself asked to be dropped from their label. Things were dire. And all of this despite frontman Jonathan Donahue considering it their best album yet; not a great headspace for him to be in.
So Deserter’s Songs was born from a band in disarray, but it almost didn’t happen.
As Donahue slipped into depression and drug use, he revisited some of his favorite childhood albums. I’m not talking about the stuff from his formative teen years. I’m talking about albums like Tale Spinners for Children — true kids albums, this one being spoken word fairytales backed by classical music.
It was with these on his turntable and a collaboration with The Chemical Brothers, that Donahue began crafting what would become Deserter’s Songs.
The remaining Mercury Rev band members hadn’t been talking for a while, and the collaboration with The Chemical Brothers was just the creative boost that Donahue needed.
So, a band that fell apart, struggles with drugs and relationships, and interpersonal strife between the remaining band members. Despite these challenges, Mercury Rev started to reconnect, rebuild, and became determined to create something new and different.
They decided to make one more record entirely for themselves, ignoring commercial influences, and expecting to split up shortly afterward. Donahue began talking to guitarist “Grasshopper” again and he has since noted that Deserter’s Songs was more about re-establishing their friendship more than anything else.
Everything pointed to Deserter’s Songs being the end. The end of Mercury Rev. The end of making music together. It didn’t matter anymore, so long as the friendship was repaired. And with that supposed end in sight, that gave them the freedom to, frankly, not give a fuck!
I mean, if things won’t continue, who cares about commercial success? Who cares how the public and critics will receive the album? It was for them and them alone.
They went into the studio — Tarbox Road — and began working with former band member Dave Fridmann.
Now, I mentioned The Flaming Lips earlier. This is where they come in.
Tired of reading yet? You can get a similar scoop in my YouTube video recounting how the album almost didn’t happen, which also covers Mercury Rev’s connection with The Flaming Lips. Check that video out below:
The Connection Between Mercury Rev & The Flaming Lips
The connection between Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips dates back to 1989 to about 1991 — when Mercury Rev frontman Jonathan Donahue was actually part of The Flaming Lips, but the story goes well beyond that.
At, before, or just after Fridmann began working with Mercury Rev on Deserter’s Songs, he began working with The Flaming Lips on what would be The Soft Bulletin. These projects overlapped, and the bands would often pass each other in and out of the studio.
The overlap with Fridmann wasn’t the only overlap. Both bands began experimenting with new ideas, concepts, sounds, and gadgets. With Fridmann in the middle, some of the ideas that stemmed from this experimentation were shared, and thus there was this swirling genius of ideas and exploration around Tarbox Studio that was essentially the perfect storm of creativity and creation, the perfect coming together of brilliant minds.
Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips noted: “I think without Deserter’s Songs being so significant, The Soft Bulletin would probably have not been followed too much. But since it was put in the same vein, people became very interested in us.”
Listen to “Holes,” the opening track off Deserter’s Songs, and you’ll likely pick up some nuances that could easily have been sung by Coyne. As for who influenced whom, I’d lean toward stating it was Fridmann who’s work with both at the time drew out the magic that made both Deserter’s Songs and The Soft Bulletin reach the levels of awe and influence they ultimately came to have.
Coyne himself has called Deserter’s Songs a brilliant record and credited it with inspiring The Flaming Lips own move towards a more orchestral sound on The Soft Bulletin. In a 2011 interview with The Quietus, Coyne noted, “Mercury Rev are just beautiful. They’re doing things that we can’t do…It’s something we’re always in awe of.”
Let’s flip to Donahue. In a 2019 interview with NME, he spoke about the connection between the two albums, saying, “We all went on this journey of trying to find something that was greater than us. I think we were all trying to reach for something that was beyond our own lives and experiences.”
To end my coverage on Deserter’s Songs, Wayne Coyne said it best, “It’s beautiful music that makes you want to cry and laugh and sing all at the same time.” And, as Donahue himself said in an interview with NPR, Deserter’s Songs is “an album that has its own life, its own identity. And it’s not something that we could ever repeat or replicate again.”
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