Mercury Rev
Snowflake Midnight
V2

Rating:

Mercury Rev have traced a strange trajectory in the decade following their first masterpiece, Deserter’s Songs. 2001’s All Is Dream was excellent, a fragile collection of songs draped in beautiful arrangements. Four years in the making, its follow-up The Secret Migration was a relative failure. That fragility had turned to lead, thick instrumentation drowning any notion of tune or subtlety.

Snowflake Midnight is every bit the return to the success of 1998, albeit in a totally different form. Gone is the echo-ing Americana, and to the fore comes electronic soundscaping; loops and glitches. The change in sound is probably tied to the change in writing process, faced with creative block they turned to random note generators and online effects libraries. The result is an inorganic but beautifully natural record.

The marriage between Donahue’s trademark vocals and the new guitar-free Rev is a happy one, the songs float past, seeming both to evolve and endlessly repeat. There’s plenty of range here too, with the mood changing across and within tracks. Album highlight, People Are So Unpredictable is the best example. The track warps over its near seven-minute length from a delicate ‘curious flower’ to a devastating run of drums, reminiscent of M83’s cinematics, and then back again to a looping piano.

The band still inhabit the same universe as previously, this is no Rev-olution. Tracks like the superb Dream Of A Young Girl As A Flower and opener Snowflake In A Hot World are Mercury Rev alright, just with a brilliant electric sheen. Perhaps the band see this as a return to their early experimental work. If so, then they have done a stunning job of melding experiment to melody.

Mercury Rev - Senses On Fire

By registering on the Mercury Rev website, you can get an instrumental ’second disc’ of Snowflake Midnight, called Strange Attractor. The band are quoted as saying that tracks swapped places between the two albums, so the quality should be just as high. It’s in my download queue as I type…

I’ve reached a critical point in my quest for new-ness. For some time I haven’t bought much music, new or old, relying instead on the constantly rotating shopfront of sites like Elbows and Hype. Sure, there is the occasional trip to a record store or two, and the necessary purchases made. But I strive for something new. Not new as in recently released, but new as in something to stir an untouched part inside.

So I’ve come up with a solution. Not a perfect one by any means, but something to spur on purchases of artists and albums that I would never pick up in a shop. So, once a week I will purchase about three albums from Amazon, aiming at around twenty quid for the bunch.

Using a random number generator and Amazon’s recommendation system (honed over about half an hour of clicking ‘I love this’ and ‘I’m not interested’) I’ll hopefully discover some new artists, and some stuff by folks I love that I’ve never got around to buying. And then I’ll go and bore you all by sharing the results…

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White Denim - Shake Shake Shake MP3

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Bon Iver have announced a one-off theatre date for London this December. Playing the pretty large Apollo theatre in Victoria, I’m not sure that the home-spun wonder of the music will fit in with a venue more used to musicals like Wicked. It seats over 2,200! I’ll definitely be heading along to this one, For Emma, Forever Ago is one of the finest things I’ve heard all year.

Tickets from them Oxfam-donating good sorts at Gigantic here

This is much more the sort of performance I’d like to see from the band:

Bon Iver - Skinny Love (mp3)

Yay! The Raveonettes have deemed the internetz worthy of splurging not one, but four EPs before Christmas. The first, a three track blitz of remix goodness featuring Trentmoller’s smashing rerub of one of 2007’s key tracks, Lust. You can pick up the EP for free on their label, Vice’s website. The other three are due for release on Sep 23, Oct 21 and Nov 25.

The Raveonettes - Aly, Walk With Me (Nic Endo Rmx)