Once more The Rev evolve.
I am here, this time, to persuade you – and let’s start by acknowledging that rumour is correct, this new album from Mercury Rev is quite unlike their previous releases. Not that there is anything new about that – from shoegaze through sonic magic realism and a genre defying sound that we probably have to call “rock” for lack of a better word. On ‘Born Horses‘ there is more than a touch of jazz about the proceedings, but what is the biggest change is that Jonathan Donahue narrates, rather than sings, the songs. It is jarring at first, it’s undeniable. And yet – the more one listens the more there is to make one become convinced that ‘Born Horses‘ is an album to love and treasure. Not least because it has the capacity to keep bringing the listener to the verge of tears. It’s an album that is so full of loss, and loss of something important – which just makes it beautiful in so many places. There’s a particular point in ‘Everything that I thought I had lost‘ where the music has got lost in itself and is descending into a mournful abyss that Jonathan Donahue in a sudden hopeful clarity says “Everyone that I thought I had lost One By One I keep finding, everyone I thought I had lost I keep finding again.” It’s like a frightening glimpse into a mind on the edge of collapse that just now and then reasserts itself, each time seeming like a bright clarity that has only just happened for the first time, and then it happens again, the whole mood underscored by staccato piano and a horn that floats ever higher and ever blurrier.
There’s a similar mental disassociation on the album opener ‘Mood Swings‘, which, over a gently flowing jazzy accompaniment, sees Donahue embark on a therapeutic journey of exploration, in an attempt to understand his ever changing moods. A journey that touches on medication and on childhood memories and reaches an amused exasperation with “Night after night my mood swings come and go as they like, rebellious fickle teenagers unable to decide, I sure wish they’d make up my mind.” At over seven minutes it’s the longest track on the album, yet it seductively passes in what the mind insists is just moments. Equally low key in tone, ‘Your Hammer, My Heart‘ is a brutally honest assessment of a love affair that, unsurprisingly given that title, does not end well: “and like the director you are you gave me my first big break when you gave me my first tragic part, close to the end where the plot twists and your hammer meets my heart.”
A sombre album then, and one riven through with feelings of loss and tempered with a seasoning of despair – and yet at the same time full of that Mercury Rev magical realism and with glimmers of hope in the occasional soarings of the title song, and especially on the all out up-tempo closer of ‘There’s Always Been A Bird In Me‘ which embraces a sense of internal emotional fluttering and makes of this symbol of insecurity and anxiety if not a thing to treasure then a thing to accept and come to terms with. To know and come to terms with one’s weakness makes of it something that doesn’t need to be hidden or afraid of – this will always make me anxious, Donahue appears to declare, but that just means I can do these things knowing that they will worry me. But I can still do these things.
‘Born Horses‘ is a ‘Rev of a different colour, undeniably, but it’s nonetheless thoughtful, insightful and musically mesmerizing and worthy of attention.
