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“We actually had the good fortune to meet the rabbit that’s on the cover,” says Jeff Mercer of Mercury Rev, referring to the black furry face of the band’s latest record, Snowflake Midnight. “We went and did some press photos in the spring with a Belgian photographer, and it’s her rabbit, so she was explaining to us how to hold them. It’s not like a dog or a cat, they have distinct personalities, you have to treat them a bit differently. They’re interesting little beings.” Mercer explains that a second rabbit was photographed for the inside of Mercury Rev’s other new record, Strange Attractor. But few have seen the sleeve for the instrumental LP, available primarily as a free download from the band’s Web site (mercuryrev.com), once you register to receive their newsletters. That album’s “cover” (to use the nearly antiquated packaging terminology) is a photo of a cat staring down its own mirror reflection, a fitting image for a work that serves as a companion piece, one that reveals a lot about how both records were made. Since 1991, over six albums, the New York State band has moulded rock and pop music that seems rooted in surreal dream worlds, employing unusual studio techniques to maximize their often seductive, sometimes scalding cascade of textures and tones. Over the years, the influx of accessible melodies and familiar structures has increased, so with their seventh (and eighth) record, the band opted for change. Relocating to a smaller studio forced them to purge some of the gear they’d come to rely upon; switching up the band members’ traditional roles provided different views on instrumentation and arrangements; and spontaneous songwriting brought about a return to their more experimental roots. “We walked into the studio with no preconceived notions, no real material prepared, and just played together and let things develop,” Mercer explains. “We recorded everything, and after about a year of working like that, we said, ‘Maybe we should look back at what we’ve done,’ and we were alarmed to find that we had nearly 100 hours of all sorts of material. Then we began the rather daunting task of cataloguing ideas.” Due to the band’s uncharacteristically laborious M.O., their producer and onetime member Dave Fridmann actually had less work to do than ever, particularly on the instrumental album, which remained closer to its raw state than the material culled for Snowflake Midnight. “The free and very expansive feel of Strange Attractor is indicative of the way we were working,” says Mercer. “If you were a fly on the wall in our studio over the last two years, that’s what you would have heard.” The band also tested out some of their material live, playing as a three-piece in venues around New York City and in dives near their homes in the Catskills, under the name Harmony Rockets. This meant that they didn’t draw any Mercury Rev fans, alleviating them of the obligation to play older material. But using the stage as a laboratory to develop 45-minute tone poems, sometimes as the opening act for punk bands, meant that they had to face a fair number of stunned spectators. “Some nights, we got a befuddled response from people where they were just looking at us like, ‘What are you doing?’ But that’s okay—sometimes we’d look at each other the same way. It’s an experiment and you never can tell exactly how it’s gonna go. Some nights, it crashes and burns, and some nights, it goes in a way that you couldn’t have foreseen, into wonderful places.” WITH DEAN & BRITTA AT CABARET |
