Mercury Rising: Mercury Rev

“This one needs a rain storm in the middle, or a tornado.” Mercury Rev guitar lynchpin ‘Grasshopper’ shakes off a hangover to chew the fat about the band’s unmatched musical splendour, their endless addiction to work and breaking through the other side of turmoil.

Sunbeams split amber-leafed foliage as steam rises from a rocky gorge in the early autumn morning warmth. The restless falls tumble into a shady creek whilst rugged mountain peaks tower in the distance. Somewhere in the Catskills in New York State a band with a sparkling, sometimes tumultuous, decade spanning career are holed up, penning their next epic musical offering.

Mercury Rev's environment has always been a big part of their filmic, dreamlike sound. From 1998's breakthrough album 'Deserter's Songs' to latest work 'The Secret Migration', whimsy and wonderment and life's natural beauty have infiltrated the group's genre-defying soundscapes.

Guitarist Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak has been out on the razz – his voice is deep and hoarse, but you get the feeling he’s used to partying night after night. Grasshopper looks like a rock star, and the band’s history reads like the pages of a 1970s gonzo road trip. Drugs, booze, bust-ups; travel, film, music, the Rev’s story is the stuff of fiction, but their music transcends categorisation, preferring to evoke imagery of snow-scattered forests, crisp, cold dawns and white horse lapped oceans.

Starting out as an uber art rock collective, the band’s early incarnation was spawned from creating picture noise for student films. Since first album ‘Yerself Is Steam’ was greeted by (particularly) the British music press with excitement and enthusiasm in the early 1990s, the Rev has gone from strength to strength critically, despite a series of well-documented problems. The group’s follow up came in the form of ‘Boces’, with the erratic David Baker still taking on the majority of the band’s vocal duties. It was around this time that rock n roll really kicked in, drugs were rife, booze was quaffed with the same abandon as Henry VIII’s banquet guests, and the group’s live shows were unpredictable and shambolic.

The band’s time with Baker at the helm had to end. Third LP, ‘See You On The Other Side’, saw Jonathan Donahue fall into the position of frontman, having provided a large amount of supporting vocals in the past. “Everyone wasn’t getting on, “ says Grasshopper of Baker’s departure. “[He] was a very strong personality and he had very different musical ideas than we did.” The band’s live performance felt the benefit of calmer times after one of many line-up changes, increasingly favouring professionalism and mind-blowing perfection over the chaos and actual fisty-cuffs of the Baker era.