Mercury Rev's career began in a relatively open-ended manner: after recording their first demo, Donahue got a gig as the Flaming Lips' guitar tech and, later, their guitarist at the same time that bassist Dave Fridmann became the Lips' de facto producer. College ended and the band scattered, but not before UK label Rough Trade had signed them on the strength of their demo's arch weirdness.
By the time of their major-label debut, Yerself Is Steam, and its envelope-pushing successor, BOCES (named after New York State's vocational-school system), the band's æsthetic had begun to crystallize: an obsession with studio perfection, found sounds, odd instrumentation, pulse-pounding altered states, and an odd lyrical fixation on nature that reaches its apex on Snowflake Midnight. Fractal majesty permeates the lysergic throb of lyrical odes to the wonder of the natural world on "Snowflake in a Hot World," "Runaway Raindrop," and "Faraway from Cars." Mackowiak explains that "we've mostly recorded in New York State, in Buffalo, and those winters just kind of unconsciously influence you when you're holed up in the studio and there's like 10 feet of snow outside and you get that sort of The Shining feeling."
The forced isolation produced not only Snowflake Midnight but the companion disc Strange Attractor, an instrumental disc recorded at the same time that is being releasing free as a download from their Web site. The two-album set represents a culmination of the psychedelic musical experiment the band have been conducting since they were college kids, an evolution from noisy psych to a more open sound. "I had read a bunch about Miles Davis recording with Teo Macero, like In a Silent Way and stuff, and how they'd just record and leave the tapes rolling, and then Macero would just cut it up later on — so we were going for that sort of jarring juxtaposition. It's interesting when you compare it to what we used to do. But then again, when you think about it, we didn't think this band would last a couple of years, so it's pretty amazing, 20 years later!"
MERCURY REV + DEAN AND BRITTA | Paradise, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | December 5 at 8 pm | 18+ | 617.562.8800 orwww.thedise.com
