Mercury Rev
Strange Attractor

A door opens onto the unconscious, when the boundary between wakefulness and sleep is a frontier of thoughts that vanishes. "What do you see, beyond?", the shrill little voice in my head asks me. The tender bianconiglio waits motionless in the dream dimension. It's there, resting on the purple lawn, and chuckles a bit. It narrows its amused gaze, in the shadow of a pearly fir. It already knows the answers to our big question marks and watches the fool losing the main road from the other side. "What are you looking for, where?", the fat carrot-eater confidently asks. It has a golden flash in its eyes as it points to the arrow on the map, the trip-path beyond the imaginary horizon: maybe it suspects the muddled reality that belongs to us, that's all. Maybe it just wants to offer us an alternative, the red pill for a different reading of life. I believe the weary Mercury Rev from a few years ago have had more than one encounter with the cunning, lysergic little animal lately. "Strange Attractor" (co-produced by the faithful former Dave Fridmann) is the reflection in the mirror of the enigmatic bluish cat on the cover, the doubling in a reality removed from the present (dreamlike), an instrumental and hallucinogenic journey through the mist of mesmerising landscapes and cinematic digital impulses. Half of the twin release by the mercurial Jonathan Donahue, Grasshopper, and Jeff Mercel has been available for free download since last September 29, after the release of the specular "Snowflake Midnight" through normal distribution channels: all it took was signing up for the mailing list on the website of the Buffalo group.

It is astonishing how Donahue & co.'s ensemble (now a trio) can still blend like an expert chameleon, pushing the bar of a very personal creative path (between surrealist symbolism and pure abstraction from the everyday) while remaining equally recognizable and natural. Starting in '91 with a memorable acid and distorted streak, MR centrifuged their neo-psychedelia first into the pop/orchestral phase of the classic "Deserter's Songs", and now into this unprecedented pairing so far but so close of synthetic mists, evanescent loops, minimal electronics, ambient landscapes and a chorus of angels appeared, who knows, probably from heaven (the evocative "Nocturne For Norwood", which seals a spectral piano with the atmospheric and expansive spirals of Talk Talk). Often the heart is an unpredictable hostage, suffering a strong attraction ("In My Heart, A Strange Attractor"). It's an invisible place, inhabited by the echo of ghosts and impalpable tensions (the seven-minute opener "Love Is Pure"). "Strange Attractor" is a warm spiritual refuge in which to break the chains that glue us to the ground, the unicorn that rides our repressed imagination without gravity in the "Pure Joie De La Solitude" (an Aphex Twin+Notwist+Vangelis indietronica minotaur). That lost comfort and peace will finally return home in expressive ambient scenes à la Brian Eno ("Persistence And The Apis Mellifera"). Then the wind will carry us away, tearing the dead autumn leaves in a timid waltz (the melancholy elegy of the short "Fable Of A Silver Moon").

Give a close listen to these eleven visionary symphonies of psych clouds, you won't regret it: Mercury Rev are back, like an ancient phoenix reborn perpetually from its ashes. Follow the bianconiglio, Jonathan. And keep sleeping under a silver moon.