Album: Mercury Rev - Born Horses

After the client has settled on the analyst’s couch, the lights are dimmed. Music sets the mood. A wordless vocal is accompanied by chimes. Cool saxophone breezes in. Sparse piano lines ripple like heat haze. Drums are understated, yet oddly insistent. The atmosphere is mysterious. Increasingly enflamed.

Then, a voice begins speaking. It seems incorporeal; neither that of the analyst or the person seeking understanding. There is mention of mood swings which cannot be controlled, of an ancient love coloured by the sands of time. Gradually, as one track bleeds into the next, the speaker discloses their certainty they were born a horse, one which develops wings. A bond with a spirit symbolised by a hammer is revealed. The session closes with explicit confirmation that what’s been found within is permanent, never to be lost. It is established that “there’s always been a bird in me.” Enlightenment has been attained.

Mercury Rev’s evocative, mind-blowing new album is the follow-up to 2019’s literally titled Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited. Born Horses is their first album of original material since 2015’s delightful The Light in You. Subsequent to these, band constants Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper, and less venerable but still long-time member Jesse Chandler, have been joined by Marion Genser (like Chandler, she plays keyboards).

As to where this unique album is coming from, various inspirations are acknowledged in the accompanying press release: Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack, Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, Chet Baker, minimalist composer/musician and LaMonte Young associate Tony Conrad, and beat poet Robert Creeley (both of whom taught at the University of Buffalo, the institution of the city in which Mercury Rev formed 35 years ago). Listeners may detect any of these stimuli. They may also sense the spirits of Eden Ahbez, Ken Nordine and The Zodiac’s 1967 Cosmic Sounds album. Perhaps too, with Born Horses’ two most straightforward tracks, a kinship with Sigur Rós when they were on the cusp of their international breakthrough.

In Mercury Rev’s own pantheon, the closest aesthetic relative is the Inner Autumn Outer Space sonic exploration (released in 2013, but recorded in 2007), a 46-minute track which could have been composed at the dawn of the space  age to accompany a documentary on the rings of Saturn. How fitting it is then, that with the enigmatic and wonderful Born Horses Mercury Rev have fashioned their own cosmos.

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