![]() ![]() Donahue and primary vocalist David Baker occasionally poke their heads out to recite inscrutable verses like those of “Chasing a Bee” and “Coney Island Cyclone’ (the disc’s most linear - and Lips-like - tune), but the most compelling songs, like the sumptuous “Sweet Oddysee of a Cancer Cell t’ th’ Center of Yer Heart,” aggressively challenge listeners to cull individual kernels of sound from the pandemonium. On Yerself Is Steam (go on, say it aloud), the band - which formed in Buffalo in the ’80s - layers the sonic effluvia on so thick you’d swear they were counting on the sheets of sound as protection against a long lake effect snowstorm. The free-form freakouts, however, are there in full force. While analogous in some ways to the Flaming Lips (a band that guitarist Jonathan “Dingus” Donahue played with for one album, In a Priest Driven Ambulance, in 1990 Rev bassist David Fridmann co-produced that LP), Mercury Rev possesses neither the Lips’ pop savvy nor the user-friendliness. Plenty of bands advocate anarchy, but few have practiced it with the single-minded determination of Mercury Rev, a psychedelically inclined sextet given over to every-man-for-himself excursions as open-ended as “pop” music has seen in many a year. ![]()
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