Legendary psychedelic rock band Mercury Rev returns with their new album, Born Horses, due out on 6th September via Bella Union. Following the first single, “Patterns,” today the band shares “Ancient Love,” the enchanting and celestial second opus from this much-anticipated LP.
Commenting on the track, Mercury Rev says: “What we are today comes from our thoughts and perceptions of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life for tomorrow. Our life is the creation of our mind which originates from ancient love.”
In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskill 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, and 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 its soul but can never truly know the answer? A sound and vision begun with skeletal chords and surges of self-reflection, alive to the notions and motions of time and reality somehow both linked to their exalted past whilst quite unlike anything they have created before?’’
Grasshopper: “When Jonathan and I first met, one thing we bonded over was Blade Runner, both Ridley Scott’s film and Vangelis’ soundtrack: that feel of the past and the future, the haunting noir mood and the romance of the future…Born Horses taps into some of that. Looking back to childhood, to Broadway tunes, to lonesome blues, Chet Baker, Miles Davis’ Sketches Of Spain, records that our parents listened to, but we put a twist into the future. From the beginning, Mercury Rev were on a cusp, between analogue and digital, hi-fi and lo-fi at the same time. It was like Brecht or Weill, the words suggesting visuals, and the visuals suggesting moods. We also thought a lot about the desert on this record, and the urban desert.”
Listen to “Ancient Love” – BELOW:
The album title, named after the majestically rippling sixth track ‘Born Horses’, was chosen because its 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 oneself.
Jonathan Donahue: “When I opened my voice to sing on this record, this was the bird that sang: a lower, whiskery voice, which surprised me as much as it may others. I don’t know where the bird came from, but it’s there now, and I don’t question it. It’s just the bird that wants to sing.”
Born Horses opens with ‘Mood Swings’. A trumpet, evoking bohemian 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. It establishes Born Horses’ tone of vulnerability and awe, 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’.
More inspiration was provided by the spirits of the art minimalist Tony Conrad and beat poet Robert Creeley, acolytes of progressive thought and action who both taught at the University at Buffalo, the city where the band was formed. Amongst other credentials, Conrad was a member of LaMonte Young’s Dream Syndicate along with John Cale and a close friend to The Velvet Underground. Creeley was one of the most important and influential American poets of the 20th century as well as an associate of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Black Mountain poets.
Jonathan: “Since our beginning in the late 80’s with David Baker through the recording of Born Horses with new permanent members, Woodstock native (pianist) Jesse Chandler and Austrian born (keyboardist) Marion Genser, we’ve celebrated this unspoken trust in the ‘statue already inside the marble’. We didn’t make Born Horses by throwing clay on top of clay; we allowed Time to reveal what was always there.”
Mercury Rev Live Dates:
27th October – Belfast – Mandela Hall
28th October – Limerick – Dolans Warehouse
29th October – Galway – Roisin Dub
30th October – Cork – Cyprus Avenue
31st October – Dublin – Button Factory
2nd November – Norwich – Arts Centre
3rd November – Bristol – Trinity
4th November – Newcastle – Boiler Shop
6th November – Glasgow – The Garage
7th November – Leeds – Brudenell Social Club
8th November – Cambridge – Junction
9th November – Brighton – Mutations Festival
11th November – Amsterdam – Paradiso
12th November – Leuven – Het Depot
13th November – Paris – La Maroquinerie
15th November – Weissenhauser Strand – Rolling Stone Beach Festival
16th November – Copenhagen – Bremen Theatre
17th November – Johanneshov – Slaktkyrkan
18th November – Oslo – Vulkan Arena
2025:
13th March – Liverpool – Content
14th March – Manchester – New Century Hall
18th March – Portsmouth – Wedgewood Rooms
19th March – London – EartH
Born Horses artwork and tracklist:
1. Mood Swings
2. Ancient Love
3. Your Hammer, My Heart
4. Patterns
5. A Bird Of No Address
6. Born Horses
7. Everything I Thought I Had Lost
8. There’s Always Been A Bird In Me
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