9 September 2024
Album artwork
Day-and-night dreamers MERCURY REV – with key members Jonathan Donahue and
Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak – have their 9th LP, their first in 9 years out. It’s named BORN HORSES. The band have cited the late beat poet Robert Creeley as one of the inspirations when creating the album.
Press info: “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 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 (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).”
Press photo by Joe Magistro
Mojo (British musical monthly): “Bands, as Donahue famously sang on Holes,
“never work quite right”, but with this late-period beauty, Mercury Rev have hit
the cosmic balance perfectly.”
TUTV: Reflections about the past, the present and the future. Frontman Jonathan
Donahue tells stories about life. Real images, illusionary images. His heartwarming
voice and the subtly jazzy, soothing and tranquilizing orchestrations flow into each
other just beautifully.
Poetry in motion. Born Horses is an ideal companion for meditative nights, for silent
moments of nostalgic pensiveness and widescreen fantasies. After a couple of spins,
I played Laurie Anderson‘ new album Amelia (about the legendary female aviator Amelia). Other stories but a same telling atmosphere and impact, same cinematic sonority. Then back again to Born Horses. A spiritual experience. Dim the light, sit down, relax and let
your thoughts flow.
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MR: Instagram