While Mercury Rev's magnificent 1998 album, Deserter's Songs, remains a wistful and bewitching postcard from upstate New York, its follow-up, All Is Dream, is no mere postscript. The sources and symphonics remain somewhat similar, but the sounds are far more fragile, brittle and enticing than before.
Eerie melodies, half-heard melancholic lines about creeks and moons, wisps of psychedelic reels, gorgeous clanging guitars, euphoric tempos, spiders and flies, monsters and vampires - All Is Dream may allude to the half-light but it certainly doesn't belong in the shadows.
A bit like its creators. For far too long, Mercury Rev were regarded as arch art-rockers who hummed about Chasing A Bee and Carwash Hair and hammed around onstage. Live shows featuring the wilful destructiveness of wayward former vocalist David Baker distracted from the inherent beauty of the early albums, Boces and Yerself Is Steam. Little wonder then that the band's third album, See You On The Other Side, was released to almost inaudible applause or that the battered crew who found their way back to the Catskill Mountains in the aftermath of the subsequent tour were so frazzled.
"I came into the picture around See You On The Other Side and I knew that some things had . . . transpired. There had been some definite rough times during the tour for that record, some very bleak times," says Jeff Mercel. He is being diplomatic, as the fall-out from that album and tour was considerable. Lead singer Jonathan Donahue had a nervous breakdown; guitarist Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak fled to a monastery; flautist Suzanne Thorpe decided to study forensic science for a spell; and Dave Fridmann called time on touring and stayed in his studio.
Like his fellow band-members, the affable Mercel still cannot fathom the failure of See You On The Other Side to find a home.
"I thought it was a wonderful record," he says. "I still think it is, but the fact was that it fell on deaf ears. We're not pessimists, but you have to prepare yourself for what might happen, so we approached Deserter's Songs a little cautiously. When we were finished, we were ready for anything. We knew we had a winner on our hands because the songs were great, but we didn't know how it would be received."
They were not alone, because few could have foreseen the arc Deserter's Songs took on release. Recorded by Fridmann with the help of two former members of The Band, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, an album Mercury Rev had viewed as the final hurrah in fact signalled a new beginning. Its parade of timeless, effortless classics about life and death and love and loss soon struck a chord.
"When it started rolling and people were saying good things, it was a complete surprise, especially when it kept going and building in intensity," Mercel recalls.
It's obvious that All Is Dream is built solidly on the confidence engendered by a successful album.
"Yeah, that would be fair, we took a lot of strength from touring and seeing the connection people were making with the music," says Mercel. "It was fuel, it was energy for what we were going to do. When we started on this record, it was like being shot out of a cannon. We didn't waste any time - we finished touring in October 1999 and we were writing songs in November and in the studio by December. Yeah, it took us some time to finish it" - he laughs - "but we were so fired up when we started."
But this confidence only went so far. "A successful album doesn't entitle you to anything," Mercel maintains. "Just because people liked Deserter's Songs doesn't mean they will like All Is Dream. We spent a lot of time making this record, a lot of sweat and blood and emotion and care. Our recording process is very involved, it's a struggle. It mightn't take that long to come up with the song in your head but getting it down onto tape is a mighty, mighty struggle. We spend more time listening and erasing than we do actually recording."
What has certainly changed over the course of the two records is the texture of the canvas. Deserter's Songs was a weather-beaten ode to the America of highways, prairies and wide open spaces but All Is Dream concentrates more on smaller themes and a world in which the distinctions are blurred between what is real and what is not. Donahue's nature-splattered lyrics are the key sea change in this regard because, as Mercel points out, the sounds remain the same. "If you listen back to earlier records, even before the last one, the orchestration is there; it's just the instrumentation which has changed, a lot of guitars as opposed to a lot of strings. It's the same basic technique."
If their breakthrough album was dipped in the fabled legend of The Basement Tapes and Music From The Big Pink, thanks to their collaborators Helm and Hudson, this album's lucky talisman was Jack Nitzsche. A producer who worked most famously with Phil Spector, The Rolling Stones and Neil Young, as well as scoring films such as The Exorcist, he was entranced by Deserter's Songs and agreed to come on board.
"We were attracted to his life and his music. He was a bit like us in that he had come through all manner of problems, but he was still inspired by what could be done," says Mercel.
However, just as recordings with him were about to begin, Nitzsche suffered a heart attack and died. "Of course, he was then omnipresent throughout the rest of the sessions. It was hard to think about the sound without wondering what he would say or would think. It took time to find a shape."
Much of this shape-finding was down to Dave Fridmann. A member of the band since the very beginning, Fridmann's reputation as a producer soared after Deserter's Songs - so much so that "it's certainly harder to book studio time with him now", according to Mercel.
Yet there's little doubt how important Fridmann is to Mercury Rev. "He's 25 per cent of the equation when we go into the studio," Marcel explains. "Jonathan, Grasshopper and I write the songs and come up with the ideas and arrangements and bring them into Dave and he throws his ideas into the mix.
"Whoever speaks the loudest and has the best ideas is heard. Dave is great at drawing things out of you; he's not trying to stamp your music with a certain sound. He's as much baffled as we are by what's supposed to be popular or not."
It also seems that the band's geographical isolation - living up in the Catskills in a small town called Kingston - works to its advantage. "Most people where we live don't know exactly what it is that we do, " says Mercel. "When we tell them that we play music, they think we're a bar band who play covers. To them, being in a band is more of a hobby, so the idea that you can make some sort of a living at it is hard for them to grasp. We don't talk about it much. When we're home, we do normal, everyday things."
As Mercel's homespun logic puts it, they have old friends to meet and greet. "There's a lot of people who have no idea who we are or what we sound like, so you have to introduce yourself to them. Because we're human beings, we've changed in three years and our music has changed too and people are curious about that. It's like when you see an old friend that you haven't seen in a while, you catch up on what's going on."
He laughs. "There'll be a lot of that in the coming months."
All Is Dream is on V2 Records. More about Mercury Rev at www.mercuryrev.net