The Rev blows the entire red gel budget in the first 20 minutes... ...which kind of killed the whole "stygian darkness" effect... ...but natural light seems to suit them equally well.

Mercury Rev has released an album since then, the similarly gorgeous All Is Dream, and though it will never mean to me what the previous album does, it has seen heavy rotation around my apartment in recent months. For those of you who haven't hitched your wagons to the Mercury Rev star, describing their sound is rather difficult. The band made its name with psych-rock, but its recent output has transcended psychedelia and created something that, while somewhat psychedelic, is certainly not similar to anything else that bears that name. What is certain about these albums is that the instrumentation is lush to the point that it might overwhelm Phil Spector. Genius producer and studio-only band member Dave Fridmann has taken the band to a level of brilliance that even their most ardent admirers had never expected them to reach. The only problem with this kind of studio sorcery is that sooner or later, unless you're the Beatles, you have to take your show on the road. I had a considerable weight of memory wrapped up in Deserter's Songs, and was excited but nervous to see how the band would handle its own highly nuanced music in a live context.

I arrived too late at Irving Plaza to catch opening act Nikki Sudden, which is a shame, as from the audio clips on his website I'm guessing I really would have enjoyed his set. Let this be a lesson to all you kids: sometimes the advertised start time and the real-life start time are actually the same thing.

I arrived just as Mercury Rev was finishing their first song, and as I jostled into picture-taking position, I got a chance to check out the band and its hired guns. Chief among the surprises at the show was the relative paucity of musicians. The lineup consisted of (depending on the song) one or two guitarists, bass, drums and two keyboards. This, for a band that recently has made constant use of autoharps, theremins, full string sections, oboes, trombones, French horns and enough tympani to choke Mahler. Naturally, something would be lost in the translation.

The set list drew almost exclusively from All Is Dream and Deserter's Songs, with one notable and excellent dip into 1991's Yerself Is Steam. The live setup gave longtime Rev-ers Jonathan and Grasshopper room to layer on the guitar, often to devastating effect. The songs that translated (and often transcended) their album versions best were those that had a rock feel to start with. "Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp" and "Goddess on the Hiway" from Deserter's revealed new, harder sides as Grasshopper's guitar shrieked into multiple solos and the band sturmed und dranged like a much less artsy group. "You're My Queen", from the latest album, achieved a new level of rock, adding an interesting texture to what was already one of the standouts on the record. Other highlights of the set included "Holes" -- which is, to my mind, one of the most beautiful songs ever written; thankfully, the band pulled out the bowed saw for the song's latter half, the omission of which would have been simply unthinkable.

The two keyboards (which, along with the musicians playing them, were identical) were Rolands, the type of high-end synth that can realistically recreate the sound of a flugelhorn being played inside of an underwater shed with a corrugated 1/4" tin roof, if that's the sound you need. Through these men's good offices, much of the nuance of the band's material was translated to the live performance. Still, it was inevitable that the audience would, at points, look at each other as if to say, "Where's the French horn?" This was truer in some songs than in others: on "Tides Of The Moon", much, but not all, of the backing horn parts were reproduced; "Lincoln's Eyes" was missing the theremin (or theremin-y sounding) overlay, which was inadequately replaced with a more prominent guitar part; "Nite and Fog"'s sweeping chorus was noticeably thinner. I am further guessing that the limited instrumentation precluded other songs from the set list: "Hudson Line" is just not really playable without a live saxophone (or so I must assume).

These shortcomings should not, however, be seen as mood-killers. In fact, the band has clearly put a great deal of effort into the atmospherics of their shows. The result is a mini-Pink Floyd experience, with no Mr. Screen, but plenty of computer-guided lights and a surfeit of fog (see poor quality of accompanying photos). Lead singer Jonathan Donahue's eerie vocals practically demand bombastic showmanship, and his Freddie Mercury-style histrionics combined with his Pete-Townsend-and-Perry-Farrell's-love-child looks to rivet the audience's attention throughout the set. In fact, I think it was safe to say that everyone got their $17.50 worth from upstate New York's favorite sons.

Article and Photos by Brett McCallon