LP - Mercury Rev - Born Horses

1LP

In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskills mountains and the Hudson Valley, a richly swelling, spellbound sound emerges. A sound composed of organic and electronic; guitars, keys, brass, strings, woodwind, drums - and a voice of incantations, tapping streams of consciousness that similarly eddy and flow.

Spiritually, literally, psycho-geographically: where else does Mercury Rev's ninth album "Born Horses" spring from? This cascade of gleaming, glistening psych-jazz-folk-baroque-ambient quest that searches its soul but can never truly know the answer? A sound and vision linked to their exalted past whilst quite unlike anything they have created before? The answer is somewhere between the homes of founder members Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper, in their veins and brains of their now-legendary tapping of musical cosmology.

A place that feeds off the levitating mood of their last album, 2019's expansive tribute "Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited", and the instrumental psych explorations under the names of Harmony Rockets and Mercury Rev's Clear Light Ensemble, and the spiritual guidance of avant-garde artist Tony Conrad and Beat poet Robert Creeley, acolytes of progressive thought and action who both taught at the University at Buffalo when Jonathan and Grasshopper were students, and to whom "Born Horses" is dedicated.