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Mercury Rev | All Is Dream

A majestic follow-up full of cinematic melodies.
CD, V2

Tekst: Omar Muñoz-Cremers

Publicatiedatum: 05 september 2001

And how can you tell the difference between syringes and missiles if you've become so pliant, ready to half believe everything and to fix conviction in nothing? - Don DeLillo, 'Underworld'

I remember Neil Hagerty of Royal Trux once observing somewhat ruefully that Western civilization never has known how to really incorporate opiates; they remain after all these centuries an unanswerable challenge to the social. Which is probably one of the reasons why opiates always form a spectre that haunts rock music, if one still accepts the idea of the rock musician as a romantic outsider living in his own social space and time. If there has for some time been a relationship between rock and heroin it also should make for some interesting music when the addictive factor (if only temporarily a la Cocteau) disappears. Yet this ghost town of the mind has in the last 20 years only produced one great rock album, 'Cats and Dogs' by the aforementioned Royal Trux, a sprawling masterpiece of dreamy/nightmarish guitar music, a heartfelt final battle with the almost metaphysical tiredness following the decision to just quit getting high.

Already one can see me pulling an age-old rhetorical trick: holding up a classical example as a comparison with which new albums can never match up. True, but necessary, Royal Trux may have been the greatest rock band of the 90s, both Mercury Rev and Spiritualized were never far behind, in a sense they were the only three rock bands of the decade after My Bloody Valentine vanished. Not only that, but Mercury Rev and Spiritualized as bands have now apparently arrived at the same moment as Royal Trux at the time of 'Cats and Dogs': the fall-out where chaos is left behind. Calming down, quitting drugs, and in the case of Jason Pierce opting for family life is where it's at.

A big difference between the two bands is that Mercury Rev never were really an explicit drug band, it was all a matter of sound, a chaotic whirl of psychedelic music that suddenly calmed down with 'Deserter's Songs'. Thanks to that album Mercury Rev are one step ahead of Spiritualized, the drugs were supposedly gone, and only at the edges of the album one could catch the after-effects: the loneliness of 'Holes' followed by a sudden sense of joy in life or the cover of the album (a dark picture of a man smoking, hidden in the shadow). But 'Deserter's Songs' was also a controversial album in the way it polarized listeners. Mercury Rev, by one of those almost magical phenomena, probably gained more fans with that album than with their three previous albums combined, while on the other hand a majority of the old fans were less than happy with the new direction. Myself? I was somewhere in between, 'Deserter's Songs' never connected with me, it had some great tracks on it but overall it never came together the way things still sparked when the band played another memorable gig in Amsterdam.

And so expectations for the follow up 'All is Dream' were kept low, which of course makes it even more of a pleasant surprise. One would say in such cases: a welcome return to form, but what form? In a way the template for the album seems to be the highlight of the last: 'Endlessly' - a brilliant child's dream of a song - but infused with the psychedelic dynamics of the pre-'Deserter's Songs' era. 'All is Dream' indeed lives up to its title, sonically lengthy guitar solos burn away while strings break like giant waves, breaking and soaring to the heavens. These are big romantic gestures somewhere between electrified Mahler and a blissed-out Peter Pan. A song like 'Chains' is the sort of song Jonathan Donahue can strike his perfect rock boy poses to in concert, lost in a wall of noise until an ELO-style breakdown takes things over. Lyrically, 'All is Dream' forms a complete regression to a perfect youth fantasy, not as the horny Oedipal intensity of 'Yerself is Steam' or the deranged kindergarten anthems of 'See You on the Other Side', but a state of childhood somewhere between overrunning joy and peripheral fear of snakes, vampires, the monsters under the bed, the forest beyond the path, or just the dark (especially on the sinister 'Lincoln's Eyes'). A feeling only made stronger by Jonathan's high-pitched little boy lost voice. Best of all is 'Nite and Fog', whose seemingly unspectacular "but you want it aaaalllll!" chorus is somehow the most touching thing I have heard anyone sing in awhile.

I'm not sure if 'All is Dream' is a truly great album as 'Yerself is Steam' and 'See You on the Other Side' were, there is something too neat and mannered about it at times, something too nice even when it swims in darker waters, and after the first five faultless songs the album becomes a hit-and-miss affair. Even so, with some of the most inspiring (or should I say, the only inspiring) rock music this year Mercury Rev survive the treacherous pull of that wicked post-addiction zone. On the closing 'Hercules' they sound stronger and more self-assured than ever, shooting out grand gestures in word and sound, "All is one/All is mine/All is lost/All is Dream", the perfect last words before the last solos surge and finally die out.

Whereas Mercury Rev never spelled out their drug use on record, Spiritualized over the years obsessively turned them into a fine-tuned aesthetic. There haven't been many singers who have sounded as blissed-out as Jason Pierce on their debut 'Lazer Guided Melodies'. On the follow-up 'Pure Phase' things started to get spelled out in lines as "Every day I wake up/And I take my medication/And I spent the rest of the day/Waiting for it to wear off" or the chillingly seductive "makes me feel like I'm a child" line on 'Let it Flow'. Indeed, 'Let it Flow' was to be the blueprint for the third album 'Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space', not only as a lyrical ode to heroin but also how the song was structured as a fix: starting out calm, getting more tense, and finally letting go into a blinding explosion of joy. On 'Ladies and Gentlemen...' the conceptualization so beloved by Spiritualized ran through every detail of the album: The CD-case made to resemble a pill-box, the booklet as prescription, the lyrics going into the details of use ("sometimes I get my breakfast right off the mirror"), the titles making cheeky reference to heroin ('Cop Shoot Cop'), the love songs fusing the woman/drug as object of desire. Pierce in an interview even revealed that the band made rocket-shaped songs - rockets of course being, if one remembers the cover of 'Cats and Dogs', needles pointing at the sky.

Now that Jason Pierce apparently has cleaned up his act and is set to become a family man one had to wonder what would happen to the music on 'Let it Come Down'. Surely taking out the binding conceptual factor looks like a recipe for disaster. And it is. Pierce has arrived at his 'Deserter's Songs' moment, he has changed all the personnel of his band and as an artist looks at a difficult choice: the reconstruction of the doper, what to do now your greatest lover is gone, do you choose the Dream or the Cross? Pierce on 'Let it Come Down' chooses the big post-addiction themes of redemption, pain, forgiveness, damnation, and hope instead of a regression to the safe dreamland of being a child. For the most part it's more than he can handle. Things start out well enough with 'On Fire', featuring the sharp, swinging, self-assured side of Spiritualized doing a great imitation of the Rolling Stones' boogie. Lyrically, the song is a nice play on the Icarus theme when Pierce sings about "flying in the sun", which, not coincidentally, echoes Mercury Rev's same mythical transformation of the druggie on 'Tides of the Moon' ("fly into the face of the sun"). 'On Fire' is only one of three songs on 'Let it Come Down' that can be described as being any good, but the second one, 'The Twelve Steps', on its own is worth buying the album for. 'The Twelve Steps' contains all the right moves for making a Classic Rock Song. Basically building on the riff from last album's 'Electricity' it blows that track away at a furious pace, Pierce spitting out the words in a daze of amphetamine lucidity. It does what a good rock song should do, it possesses you and makes you feel at home in your body, the way you feel when your hair is just perfect, all your clothes fit and match, you're going out, just the right amount of drink/drugs push your chin up, all the girls smile, you feel cool and can take on the whole world. That good.

After that song the album disintegrates in shocking fashion, the mid-section of 'Let it Come Down' is a total disaster. The problem is simply that Pierce this time tries to write real songs. And without the drones, the stoned drawl, and the tingling guitars it becomes clear the Pierce isn't really that good a songwriter. The point of Spiritualized never really was the songs, this is after all a band that used to play live on the same bill as Aphex Twin and Irresistible Force, they were always more of a techno group with guitars than a pure rock band. Of course, he always had a way with a good rock cliche (say 'Come Together'), but the lyrics on 'Let it Come Down' are for the most part embarrassing: Formless ballads are drowned in strings, while Pierce lamely tries to battle with pearls of wisdom like "out of sight is out of mind" and "some people say love is blind". Then, just when you're ready to give up, things do come together on the ten-minute 'You Won't Go to Heaven', a driving tune that finally achieves the synergy of gospel, nagging Stooges piano riff, and some great Ayler-style saxophone shreds. A perfect closer in short, were it not for the useless remake of his own Spacemen 3 song 'Lord Can You Hear Me' that follows. Actually the new version isn't bad, although it pales to the original where Pierce sounded totally devastated and alone. Here the song sound kitsch, dressed up with gospel singing, and one wonders, if for all his references to God, Jesus Christ, and salvation, Jason Pierce really believes or just uses gospel as an aural cosmetic effect the same way he nicks a Stooges riff. The relationship between drugs and religion is fascinating, especially as dealt with in Abel Ferrara's film 'The Addiction', but Spiritualized in this form aren't focussed or cold-hearted enough to really work out the labyrinth of faith and addiction. When they connect Spiritualized still soar, but somewhere with the loss of conceptual anchor, the endless change of personnel, the band has lost its edge. Gone are the Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Suicide influences that gave them at times such a seductive minimal beauty, gone also is the ambition. The most unexpected damage the needle can do: by its absence, not its presence, take away inspiration.