They came down from the mountains - the Catskills to be precise - and they carried their saws under their arms. No, we're not talking woodcutters here, although their music does sound as if it has been carved out of an old Yew tree, but we're not talking your average rock 'n' roll band either. Mercury Rev, critics' favourites of 1998, are yer perennial outsiders, flitting in among the speckled shadows of mainstream rock, and suddenly zooming into view with a stinging, intoxicating stab of brilliance.
These mercurial, revved-up country boys weren't always mountain men. Hailing from the town of Buffalo, in New York's Hudson Valley, Jonathan Donahue and Sean "Grasshopper" Mackiowiak were just another couple of college boys with guitars, grungy haircuts, and visions of an alternative American rock nirvana, where leftfield music took centre stage, and the futuristic sounds mingled in with echoes of the past.
The debut album, Yerself Is Steam, took three years to put together, during which time Donahue sang with acclaimed alterno-rockers Flaming Lips. When singer David Baker quit Mercury Rev in 1994, the stage was set for Donahue and Mackiowiak to begin collaborating on the symphonic, y'alternative sound which eventually yielded the 1995 album, See You On The Other Side. The centrepiece song on the album, Everlasting Arm, gave a clue to the wide-sweeping musical horizons to which Mercury Rev were now aspiring.
Tours with Dylan, My Bloody Valentine, Porno for Pyros, Pavement and The High Llamas fuelled the Rev's reputation for self-destructive rock 'n' roll behaviour, and when the band slowly dispersed and disappeared into the woods, no one really expected them to emerge three years later with a certified American classic, a symphonic country opus with its roots set firmly in the soil and dirt. Along with saws, glockenspiels, flugelhorns and Chamberlin strings, Deserter's Songs also featured Garth Hudson and Levon Helm of The Band as guest musicians. Along with the new album, the Rev also brought this hastily-scribbled missive: "And we made other records before this . . . some good music too . . . and this one is about the hi's and low's of things you come to grips with, or you don't, and who gets swallowed along the way. We never sold a million records which makes a difference to some people and to some people it doesn't."
Mercury Rev play the Red Box tonight at 8 p.m.
Deserter's Songs is out now on V2 Records.
