Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 09/10/06
Label: V2

Waking in the dead of night, face buried in the smell of the one you love. A stray beam of light on your neck as you walk through a dense wood. The exquisite, rending pain of a final goodbye. Spray on your face as you stand above a stormy sea. It's moments like these - fleeting, sublime - that Mercury Rev music at its most beautiful hunts out. But not always. Because almost half of this extraordinary band's first retrospective, "Stillness Breathes", explores the caterpillar years before they became a butterfly.

Like peers The Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev were in their first incarnation a determinedly lo-fi, experimental band much indebted to drone rockers like Spacemen 3. Just hear the shambling, shuffling "Frittering", or the hazy, FX-heavy "Something For Joey". If Mercury Rev had folded in 1996 - and they nearly did, beset by record label troubles, a departing lead singer and the inevitable drug addictions - they would be remembered as an oddly charming, minor curiosity.

But something exceptional and rare happened: Jonathan Donahue, Mercury Rev's chief architect and singer, suddenly found his voice. That very moment can be found here, heart-stoppingly, on "Holes", the first song on breakthrough album "Deserter's Songs" and one of the most otherworldly, beautiful songs ever written. Donahue's voice is suddenly in a soaring, high, impossibly fragile register, while the music crystallises into lavish, pristine orchestration.

From this point the band's music obsessively pursued the same exquisite emotional terrain, a sense of awe in the face of life's beauty and love's terrors. Witness the emotional explosions of "The Dark Is Rising", strings surging around Donahue's piercing vocals. Sink into the hushed, dreamlike "Black Forest (Lorelei)", be swept along by the swooning grace of "Opus 40".

There are disappointments, too. Why the twee nursery rhyme "A Drop In Time" is included over songs as dense and operatic as "Secret For A Song" or as hypnotic as "Nite And Fog" is a mystery. But disc two's treasure trove of obscurities, juvenilia and cover versions is ample compensation, with highlights such as the Bowie-like swagger of "Clamor" (from before they even had their name) or the hauntingly lovely "I Only Have Eyes For You".

In all honesty, more focus on the later years would make this a better collection. But as a document of the strange, troubled history of one of the world's finest bands - arguably the finest - "Stillness Breathes" is exhilarating. If you don't know what you're missing, find out. Trust us: you have no higher priority.

    by Jaime Gill