“Where we go from here is anybody’s guess,” announces Jonathan Donahue in his unnervingly Chris de Burgh-like warble at the start of “Across Yer Ocean”. He’s not talking career trajectory, but he’s right. Devotees of Mercury Rev’s shimmering, grand scale, phantasmagoric pop are probably still bewildered by the fact that their extraordinary “Deserter’s Songs” from 1998 failed to embed them forever in the consciousness of the general public, but if that didn’t do it for them, one suspects nothing ever will.
You can’t imagine they really care. Pink Floyd might once have managed it, but in these times, exultancy makes an odd cloak for existential uncertainty and Mercury Rev have always been very much about what’s hidden in, as much as what’s revealed by, their sweetly soulful, gorgeously glazed, tripped-out pop orchestrations. For all its buoyancy - the feeling that their music is forever tugging at the kite strings of constraint – it’s a dark and troubled heart (basically, Donahue’s) that pumps the lifeblood through Mercury Rev.
“The Secret Migration” is no less enjoyable a voyage into their private fantasia than “Deserter’s Songs” or 2001’s (decidedly disturbed) “All Is Dream”, but its landscape is noticeably brighter. The 13 tracks here are less self-consciously sumptuous, less here-we-go dramatic, painted in natural tones rather than Technicolour and, although the lyrics read like a dippy celebration of the bounty of a mysterious universe - with talk of raindrops, stars, white horses in black forests, migratory birds and the “unseen force behind the turning leaves” - with so many bands opting to pen sombre songs about our post-9/11 world, it’s both sweetly refreshing and entirely in character.
As with previous LPs, “The Secret Migration” works as a set-piece but, with the strings kept on a tighter leash and the production less fulsome, it’s easier to notice the details: the way the driving, wind-battered power of “Vermillion” reveals Mercury Rev as an American Waterboys; the fact that “Arise” suggests it’s not just the harmonising power of The Beach Boys that so beguiles the band, but The Righteous Brothers’, too; and, on “In A Funny Way”, their appropriation of the woozy, narcotised, wall-of–fur sound that served The Jesus And Mary Chain so well on “Just Like Honey”. It’s both less obviously Mercury Rev and a record only they could make. They’ll be with us for some time yet.
