Wavin' goodbye I'm not sayin' hello

Mercury Rev - 'Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp' (Deserter's Songs - 1998)

In December 1998, Mercury Rev were placed at the top of the NME’s albums of the year, beating out Air, The Beastie Boys, Massive Attack and Beck. I was only 15 then and didn’t know much about any of those albums, but within 18 months, I’d started reading the magazine as well as Q, Uncut, Mojo and Melody Maker regularly. This, alongside the reissue of the ‘Goddess On A Hiway’ single in 1999¹, was a catalyst to discover this fantastic album before it started turning up on best of the 1990s lists.

Reflecting on the album in 2011, lead singer Jonathan Donahue said that in 1998;

The world wasn't exactly waiting for another Mercury Rev record.

Their second album, 1993’s Boces was a continuation of their more experimental sound on debut Yerself Is Steam, and after the release of 1995’s See You on the Other Side, the band was in debt, fractured and depressed. That doesn’t mean there is nothing of note there, ‘Something For Joey’ from Boces is the melodic and beautiful song of the style that would dominate Deserter’s Songs as they smoothed their noise-rock origins to something more cinematic and enthused with a dream-like quality.

The band’s fourth album was recorded primarily in a repurposed church in Buffalo, in upstate New York. The venue’s high ceilings and sonorous acoustics lent themselves well to the creation of expansive soundscapes, reverberating in technicolour that became one of the unmistakable hallmarks of the album.

At this juncture, Donahue and Grasshopper had moved to the serene setting of the Catskill Mountains. Here, they spent the following six months immersing themselves in the creation of Deserter's Songs. Among the earliest songs they penned in this phase were ‘Opus 40" and ‘The Hudson Line’, both of which echoed the influence of their newfound Catskill environs. Notably, ‘The Hudson Line’ depicted Grasshopper's departure from the vices of New York City to find solace in a Jesuit retreat house in the northern part of the state. Their connection to the Catskills was further deepened when Garth Hudson and Levon Helm of The Band, who were local residents, became part of the recording process.

Much of the album dwells on a rural and evocative image of nature, and this is best captured in the first song, ‘Holes’, which is the soundtrack to a sunrise,² and the final track. ‘Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp’ is a closing track that embodies a profound journey of transformation for the band and the band’s followers up to that point.

For me, the context of the album’s creation is critical. The band's tumultuous past, fraught with personal conflicts, substance abuse, and near dissolution, reverberates through each track on Deserter's Songs, and the closing number serves as an aural representation of catharsis and redemption, echoing the band's journey through the tumult to tranquillity.

Donahue’s lyrics are deeply introspective on the album, almost like diary entries due to the nature of the personal reflections. The track also shows some exploratory spirit. The band utilised a variety of novel instruments. One is the Tettix Wave Accumulator, a custom-built instrument that adds a distinct sonic texture to the hidden track at the song’s end.

It’s hard to talk of the album without drawing a comparison with the following year’s The Soft Bulletin, from The Flaming Lips and tied together by; producer Dave Fridmann, the technicolour sounds the bands are aiming for, the impact on their career trajectories and both winning NME’s album of the year after some productive exchange of ideas, technologies, and inspirations while both albums were being recorded.

The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne:

... there were times when [The Flaming Lips] would go in [to the studio] right after [Mercury Rev], or they would come in right after us, and we were all exploring the same new gadgets together. They were starting to work in Protools at the same time we were. And whatever instruments, whatever new gadgets, between us, Mercury Rev and Dave [Fridmann] ... which ever band would get them, the next group into the studio would use them too. If Dave had just had some breakthrough moment he'd recorded with us, when Mercury Rev would come in he would say 'Hey ... we've got to do this, this is cool'. And the same thing would happen with us. So I think the connection is Dave Fridmann, and also this lack of really believing there would be an audience for this record. I think Mercury Rev felt the same way. Their audience had gone away, and all they could do was make the music that was in their dreams.

Yet, the importance of ‘Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp’ goes beyond its connection to Mercury Rev's metamorphosis. The song was also remixed by The Chemical Brothers and gained considerable attention, elevating the band's profile and helping to bring them back from the precipice. Donahue again;

It had the feeling of rebirth, of going down to the grave for quite a while and lying down there in the darkness and the quiet, and then someone pulls you up and shakes the dirt off you and says 'no, you thought you were dead, but you're not.

The creation of 'Delta Sun' was as cathartic as the song itself. It was a distillation of the band’s emotions, hopes and fears. It was a way of saying, “We’ve been through hell, but we're not done yet.”

Within a few years, the band’s resurrection catalyses others, not just The Flaming Lips, to explore that psychedelic, dreamy Indie-pop and cinematic sound. Grandaddy and The Delgados joined the club in 2000, and over the next decade, the likes of Elbow, M83 and Tame Impala found influence in the record.

Twenty years later, in December 2018, in Oslo in East London, I’m standing watching the band celebrating two decades of the record by playing most of its tracks. Grown men are weeping at ‘Holes’ and ‘Opus 40’, but the song that prompted the most movement from hips and legs was ‘Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp’.

The Run Out Grooves Infinite Loops

If you liked this post on a Mercury Rev song remixed by The Chemical Brothers, we have also looked at their epic closing track, ‘The Private Psychedelic Reel’, that Donahue played on.

1. It was a favourite on MTV|2 that summer.

2. The song was used in the promos for Channel 4’s ill-fated follow-up to The Big Breakfast, Ri:se.