Mercury Rev’s 1991 debut album 'Yerself is Steam' was a critical success, and quickly followed up by the 'Car Wash Hair' single. The releases persuaded the band to perform their very first live gig – then their third gig was on the main stage at Reading Festival and their fourth was supporting Bob Dylan – an auspicious start to their decades-long career. Despite the plaudits resulting in strong sales and regular tours, it was not until their fourth album, 'Deserter’s Songs' that they gained a mainstream audience. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Chasing A Bee
2. Syringe Mouth
3. Coney Island Cyclone
4. Blue And Black
5. Sweet Oddysee Of A Cancer Cell
6. Frittering
7. Continuous Trucks And Thunder
8. Very Sleepy Rivers
9. Car Wash Hair (The Bee’s Chasing Me) Full Pull
10. Coney Island Cyclone (4-track Demo)
11. Chasing A Bee (4-track Demo)
12. Untitled Extra - CD Only

Originally issued in January 2005, ‘The Secret Migration’ was the sixth album by Mercury Rev.

In the UK, where the band were signed to V2, the album spawned two singles, ‘In A Funny Way’ and ‘Across Yer Ocean’.

Back in 2020, Cherry Red unveiled a deluxe 5CD edition of this sometimes overlooked album, compiled and co-ordinated in conjunction with Mercury Rev’s twin lynchpins, Jonathan Donaghue and Sean ‘Grasshopper’ Mackowiak.

Four years on, ‘The Secret Migration’ is treated to its first-ever reissue on vinyl – and with the added bonus of a second disc. Joining the original album are various B-sides and originally unissued out-takes.

Among the bonus are cover versions of Bobby Charles’ Bearsville gem ‘Tennessee Blues’; ‘Afraid’, originally by Chicago rock band Dovetail Joint; two Paul Westerberg songs, The Replacements’ ‘Androgynous’ and his solo effort ‘Good Day’; Daniel Johnston’s ‘Blue Clouds’; and ‘I Never Had It So Good’ by Paul Williams.

Formed in Buffalo, New York, in 1989, MERCURY REV quick grew to become leading figures in left field alternative rock. Earlier albums veered towards experimental, off-kilter psychedelia but by the end of the decade, the band had developed their own brand of serene, piano-based Americana with the acclaimed, best-selling LP ‘Deserter’s Songs’ (1998).

Mercury Rev are currently active with forthcoming shows over the coming months around a brand new studio album.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE 1
1. Secret For A Song
2. Across Yer Ocean
3. Diamonds
4. Black Forest (Lorelei)
5. Vermillion
6. In The Wilderness
SIDE 2
1. In A Funny Way
2. My Love
3. Moving On
4. The Climbing Rose
5. Arise
6. First-Time Mother's Joy (Flying)
7. Down Poured The Heavens
SIDE 3
1. Tennessee Blues (featuring Bonnie Anthony)
2. Afraid
3. Seagull
4. Androgynous
5. Mirror For A Bell
6. Good Times Ahead
7. I Never Had It So Good (featuring Bonnie Anthony)
SIDE 4
1. Blue Clouds
2. Late Night Request
3. A Season Of Poussin
4. Good Day
5. Look At Brutis With His Knife

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, 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.”

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 one self.

Jonathan:
“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: “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’.

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.

Grasshopper:
“Tony was a trickster, who loved to shake things up. He knew how to put things together that might not inherently fit but then became something completely new. Robert- the beauty of his sparseness with words, but playful too, and a sense of romanticism. For me, there is also some subconscious echo in ‘Born Horses’ of Patti Smith’s Horses, the nomadic recitations that incorporate poetry into music…. it’s like a tip of the hat.”

Jonathan:
“There are a few unquestionable watermarks of Grasshopper’s studying with Tony Conrad and my own time spent with Robert Creeley. Distilling down lyric and song. Heating up during intense bursts of recording followed closely by long periods of cooling down/ listening to the work and then… un-listening to it. Leaning in to the uncertainty of what is being created. Not by us, but for us. Psychological ‘letting go of the balloon’ distance as perspective. Something we both inherited from Tony and Robert… Stepping in and stepping out of frame.”

“Since our beginning in the mid 1980’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.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There is a wealth of musical influence that Mercury Rev seem to soak into their general being, and 'Born Horses' is an album that is full of those, from grand progressive rock and symphonic classical suites to shimmering jazzy vignettes. What sets this outing aside though is Jonathan Donahue's bracing, wonderfully delivered spoken word throughout the whole LP. It's the perfect application for his voice, honestly and for me makes the whole Rev experience much more transcendent.

TRACK LISTING

Mood Swings
Ancient Love
Your Hammer, My Heart
Patterns
A Bird Of No Address
Born Horses
Everything I Thought
There's Always Been A Bird In Me

Debut on vinyl LP for Mercury Rev’s 2006 soundtrack album, HELLO BLACKBIRD. At the time, V2 planned to release this on vinyl but the project never got beyond test pressings.

Strictly limited edition of 1,000 copies on marbled blue vinyl, with a printed inner sleeve.

Musically, HELLO BLACKBIRD allowed Mercury Rev to further expand the sonic soundscapes they were exploring with The Secret Migration, with classical and ambient styles (‘The Last Of The White Birds’ reinterpreted Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in Bb minor, Opus 35 (Marche Funebre)’).

The album was recorded at Six Hour Studios in Kingston, New York, in mid-2004 and the music was intended as the soundtrack for the 2005 feature film Bye Bye Blackbird, by French director and photographer Robinson Savary.

Bye Bye Blackbird was a tragic, compelling love story set in a turn-of-the-century travelling circus, with a stellar cast, including Derek Jacobi and James Thierre.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE ONE
1. BLACKBIRD’S CALL
2. ILLUMINATION BY STREET LAMP
3. WALTZ FOR ALICE
4. TRIAL BY WIRE
5. DAYDREAM FOR NINA
6. AUDITION SCENE SKETCH (SIMPLY BECAUSE)
7. THE WHITE BIRDS
8. JOSEF’S VISION

SIDE TWO
1. EYE OF THE BLACKBIRD (TRAVELING MUSIC II)
2. THE LAST OF THE WHITE BIRDS (MARCHE FUNÈBRE)
3. CINEMA THEME
4. FIRST FLIGHT OF THE WHITE BIRDS
5. THE CHIMPY WALTZ
6. DEMPSEY’S THEME
7. FANTASIA NO. 1
8. ROBERT Y ROBERTO
9. TRAVELING MUSIC
10. DEPARTED ANGELS
11. SIMPLY BECAUSE