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What material are memories made of? Are they images? Are they sensations? Are they sounds? Are they a mixture of these three things? I often wonder, especially when I listen to this album.
Although intangible, memories have a weight, an almost physical weight. They can be as light as feathers and as heavy as boulders, as fragile as crystal and as hard as stone. But the strange thing is that in always different and new ways, and when we least expect it, an external agent brings them back from the subconscious, often randomly. And then from immaterial elements, they become a physical part of each one of us. They make the heart beat, adrenaline rush, chills run down the spine, breaking down cultural barriers between the mind and body, creating a true and profound communion.
And it is precisely of memories and this inseparable communion that Deserter’s Songs is made.
It has existed physically in my collection for a few days, but its soothing melodies have accompanied me for six years. They bring back sunsets in Arezzo, night-time cries in Venice, the smell of a woman's skin, a July morning after the street parade, a dawn on the beach under Monte Conero, and many others.
These memories are direct descendants of the music that accompanies them, music descended directly from worlds other and better than ours. A perfect balance of poignant melodies (the opening Holes, filled with an air of imminent cry thanks to its string arrangements, and concluded by a majestic sax), heavenly chants (even the most atheistic among you will think of some Christian liturgy hearing the theremin and the angelic voices of Endlessly), peremptory interludes made of crackling gramophones (I Collect Coins) and piano dissonances (The Happy End). Not to mention almost dancefloor-like tracks (Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp) and all-encompassing pop pearls like Opus 40 and Goddess on a Hiway.
Above all stands the gnomish voice of Jonathan Donahue, the true disorienting element of Mercury Rev's music, which manages to make even “the holes dug by little moles” the most important thing in the world.
Ultimately, an album with innate cathartic abilities (at least for myself), absolutely timeless and detached from its time, standing like an unreachable peak in the mid-nineties pop landscape (and in the same discography of the band, both previous and subsequent).
In my opinion, the "Forever Changes" of the past decade.
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