Mercury Rev – Born Horses (Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo)

In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskills mountains and the Hudson Valley, a richly swelling, spellbound sound emerges, eddying and flowing like the local Esopus Creek, or in the slipstream of the grander Hudson river, carrying the flotsam and jetsam of our hopes, dreams, fears. 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 it's 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 (the hamlet of Mt Tremper) and Grasshopper (the town of Kingston), in their veins and brains of their now-legendary tapping of musical cosmology, and the vital presence of new permanent member Marion Genser (keys), plus long-term ally Jesse Chandler (keys) and guests Jeff Lipstein (drums), Martin Keith (double bass) and Jim Burgess (trumpet). 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, to whom Born Horses is dedicated. Born Horses opens with 'Mood Swings'. A trumpet, evoking mariachi and the windswept terrain of the desert prairie, opens up to a dynamic panorama of sound, wandering through and enveloping Jonathan's intimate recitation, conflating memories and confessions of feelings trapped and unwrapped: "My mood swings come and go as they like / rebellious fickle teenagers, unable to decide." It establishes Born Horses' tone of vulnerability and awe, and a little frisson of fear, testifying to the frailty of human experience, buffeted by the currents all around us. The flightiness of feelings is further explored by the metaphor of a bird, most clearly in 'Bird Of No Address' and the album's pulsating finale 'There Has Always Been A Bird In Me'. The album title, named after the majestically rippling sixth track 'Born Horses', was chosen because it's words resonate through the entire record, encompassing the idea of flight ("I dreamed we were born horses waiting for wings") and the phrase "You and I" that appears at different junctures on the album. This is not the concept of two separate people, but two parts of one self. The concept of Born Horses began pre-pandemic, and then once Mercury Rev were allowed to tour and record again, Marion Genser moved over from her native Austria to join Jonathan in the Catskills, and Mercury Rev in full flight. A classically-trained painter as well as a musician, Marion has become an invaluable addition to the Rev chemical compound. More inspiration was provided by the spirits of Tony Conrad and Robert Creeley, acolytes of progressive thought and action who both taught at the University at Buffalo when Jonathan and Grasshopper were students. Amongst other credentials, Conrad was an associate of John Cale and The Velvet Underground, Creeley an associate of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Black Mountain poets. Gatefold LP w/ a 4-page booklet and inner sleeve