Mercury Rev
Yerself Is Steam

Year 1991. A band from Buffalo called Mercury Rev decides to release on 35 mm film some songs composed to accompany the images of films shot by their college mates. What comes out (and will later be published in more accessible formats) is one of the most beautiful psychedelic rock albums: "Yerself Is Steam", an intense, hallucinated, wild album.

It all starts with the drunken and distorted chant of "Chasing A Bee", built on a Neil Young-style melody that gradually gets smothered by deafening feedback, with a song-ending accompanied by a fairy-tale flute. Within the grooves of "Yerself Is Steam" are then found wild rides and stretches like "Syringe Mouth" (a hypothetical hybrid between Pixies and Flaming Lips), and "Sweet Oddysee Of A Cancer Cell T'Th'Center Of Yer Heart", played on an alternation between menacing stasis and chaotic sound vortices reminiscent of the Velvet Underground. But there's more: "Blue And Black" is a track with a gothic mood accompanied by an orchestral arrangement that would not look out of place in a Hollywood soundtrack, "Frittering" offers a poignant Pink Floyd-like melody that floats in the air like a cloud for 8 minutes, "Coney Island Cyclone" a beautiful rock track built on the guitar riff of "Walk On The Wild Side". And finally comes the long mantra of "Very Sleepy Rivers", which with its Indian melody and hysterical singing drags the listener's mind towards oblivion, at the end of an unimaginable journey.