More than words

MERCURY REV / THE DUKE SPIRIT, 11TH MARCH 2005, BIRMINGHAM ACADEMY

I'm starting to develop an intense dislike for the Birmingham Academy. In fact, it's verging on a loathing.

Which is unfortunate, given that that's where about 90% of the gigs I go to take place.

And it's not just the shitty lager which I refuse to endorse by mentioning the venue's full name.

On Fridays and Saturdays I understand the need to get people cleared out for the club night, but is it really necessary to impose a 10pm curfew on bands, which tonight means doors open at 6.30pm? I only live five minutes' walk away, but my companion for the evening has a significantly longer journey.

The upshot is that we walk into the venue, catch ten minutes of The Duke Spirit, and are just getting onto their rumbling, raggedy, slouching wavelength when Leila Moss mumbles "Thanks a lot, goodnight" and she and her bouffant-haired accomplices are gone. The only support band, a band I wanted to enjoy, and they're offstage by 7.55pm. They must have come on at 7.15pm. Great.

During the main act the venue continues to do its level best to ruin the evening. Or, rather, the bar staff do. After the intensely irritating experience of the PJ Harvey gig back in September, I am in no mood to miss a good portion of the headliner’s set by being continually overlooked in the queue, especially when tickets were £15 a pop. And yet that’s exactly what happens.

Twenty minutes after setting off for the bar, a mere ten second walk away, I return with a couple of pints and try to get back into the groove.

Mercury Rev are not a band whose music I’m particularly familiar with – my girlfriend owns All Is Dream, from which several songs are taken tonight – but neither that unfamiliarity, nor the shortcomings of the venue, nor the infuriatingly garrulous Friday night crowd can stop me enjoying their set.

1998’s Deserter's Songs paved the way for the breakthrough success of The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin album the following year which unfortunately eclipsed that of the pioneers. At times it’s hard to see a chink of light between the two bands – perhaps unsurprising given that they’re both produced by Dave Fridmann and Mercury Rev frontman Jonathan Donahue, possessed of a gorgeous voice, used to play guitar with the Oklahoma oddballs.

There’s the same sort of wide-eyed wonder in the music, too – a reverential awe in the face of nature, human existence and the magnitude of the universe reflected in their lyrics and represented in the projected images in front of which they play. Yep, whether they like the label or not, they’re 21st century hippies.

However, while Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots saw Wayne Coyne and company edging towards minimalism and electronica, Mercury Rev continue to pursue an expansive, romantic, piano-heavy sound tainted by Americana and a hint of Gothicism which evokes the widescreen vistas and clear starlit skies of the Catskill Mountains that the band call home.

The set is at first heavy with tracks from new album The Secret Migration, latest single ‘Across Yer Ocean’ particularly impressive, with older tracks like ‘Tides Of The Moon’ sprinkled in, and, as with the songs themselves, it takes time for momentum to build. But build it does, and penultimate song ‘Goddess On A Hiway’ is incredible, more than enough to compensate for the absence of ‘The Dark Is Rising’ and ‘Chains’. A three song encore concludes with ‘Spiders & Flies’, and then it’s 10pm and everybody out.

The one gripe I have about Mercury Rev’s set has nothing to do with the music. It’s the projections. Images, fair enough. They add to the whole experience. But why bother with all the quotations? It just make them look pretentious and diverts attention away from the performance as punters crane their necks to read the latest pithy words of wisdom (more often than not, some cod-mystic pronouncement that sounds impressive but doesn’t make a great deal of sense).

When the music is quite so eloquent, why bother with words?

Link:

Kenny's review of the gig.

Stylus’s Bjorn Randolph reviews The Secret Migration.