Mercury Rev
All Is Dream

THE REVIEW

A Dream in Time

It takes little. It truly takes very little to fall madly in love, as the ancients used to say, with this album. Just close your eyes and get lost on the road that leads from Earth to the Dream. All it takes is "The Dark Is Rising", with its storms, its tides, its calms, its astral conjunctions, its peaceful solitudes. These orchestral explosions followed by the simplicity of the piano and Jonathan Donahue's falsetto are enough to enter a dreamlike universe and never want to leave it.

The power of the notes draws a path that leads directly to the psychedelic Moon of "Tides Of The Moon", where other waves overwhelm us and toss us onto the face of the Sun. With the magnificent orchestrations of "Chains", all the chains that kept us tied to our physicality are broken, after which the ghosts of "Lincoln's Eyes" hypnotize us until we turn into pure extracorporeal essence, we too become specters in a world where the exquisite and highly refined pop atmospheres of "Nite And Fog" linger. With the sweet rhymes and the deep bass of "Little Rhymes", we discover that Time is all ours and that in the temporal relativism of the Christmasy sounds of "A Drop In Time" (produced by the great Tony Visconti), the Moon and the Sun chase each other again like violin escapes "glued in Leonard Cohen's mind". With "You're My Queen" and "Spiders And Flies", we are catapulted onto a tragicomic Shakespearean stage, where sirens, snakes, kings, queens, and pharaohs are nothing but ephemeral presences in front of the eternal dreamlike immanence of the constellations of "Hercules". It's this last track that, with a sublime guitar catharsis, transports us, as if through a magical musical Stargate, into the deep interstellar space hidden in the pauses between chords, words, and meanings.
Thanks to "All Is Dream" (2001), the fifth album of the band from Buffalo and the second of the "melodic" turn, we leave behind the Sun, the Moon, and especially the sands of the earthly desert and float in an astral hypnosis where we realize that "All is One, All is Mind, everything is lost and Everything is Dream".

from "The Dark Is Rising"

But it can be surprising
when you find yourself alone
and now th' dark is rising
and a brand new moon is born

I always dreamed I'd love you
I never dreamed I'd lose you
in my dreams I'm always strong