Mercury Rev | Born Horses
(Bella Union Records)
Since the early ’90s, the genre-stretching Mercury Rev, hatched in Buffalo and now partially based in Kingston, has been offering a certain stripe of baroque Catskill Mountain psychedelia to the world—pastoral, obliquely rootsy and gently chaotic all at once; equal parts Big Pink and Orange Sunshine. On the collective’s latest effort, Born Horses, vocalist Jonathan Donahue adopts a Hudson Valley sprechgesang, which would have felt oddly appropriate, in vinyl’s waning days, on the Giorno Poetry Systems label. Typically lush and delightfully pretentious (especially on the title track), Born Horses comes across as though it was recorded in a dark cathedral, with the stained glass windows shattered, lead dangling, letting in all the ravaging elements. Together, the recitative and the beautifully droning backdrop are positively mesmerizing. I don’t take drugs, but I’m pretty sure this is what that sounds like. The muted trumpet on “Ancient Love” doesn’t speak so much of West Coast cool jazz as of universal chill; of “a golden age when you were mine.” As Donahue intones in the single, “Patterns”: “The more I look, I see patterns, even in the way Ian Curtis danced.” “There’s Always Been a Bird in Me” juggles piano against a motorik beat, with quiet howls of swelling guitar winning the fight, while never interrupting the tale—”it only sings when it hurts and it always seems to hurt.” Born Horses won’t disappoint longtime fans of Mercury Rev’s glorious cacophony, but it’s likely too obscure to grow that devoted cult either, not that founders Donahue and Grasshopper likely care.
This article appears in January 2025.
