The Light In You—Mercury Rev’s 10th full-length and first in seven years—picks up where 2008’s Snowflake Midnight left off, with stalwart founders Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper drawing inspiration from nature and the Rubik’s Cube of love in equal measure. There is a strong autumnal vibe about the affair—a modern Days Of Future Passed, complete with sweeping orchestral touches and wistful remembrances by the fistful. When the band’s “psychedelic rock and blue-eyed soul” finds its groove, it’s still a breathless wonder to behold. Mercury Rev will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our MAGNET Classics feature on the band’s Yerself Is Steam.
Grasshopper: Blue Velvet is a hallucinogenic visionary film with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (if Roy Orbison’s fantastic “In Dreams” can be considered as such, it is more a mini-symphony for only the lonely). In 1986, I was studying film and video at SUNY Buffalo and when this flick came out; it blew my mind! I remember that Jonathan Donahue had called me and said, “Man, you have to go see this film!” Blue Velvet is a truly American surreal masterpiece that probes and nails the underbelly of suburban/small-town America that we are all somehow inexplicably connected to in some way. Growing up in a slightly dystopian small post-industrial town outside of Buffalo, Blue Velvet resonated (and still does) to the core of my being. And now living in the small Catskills town of Kingston, N.Y., not much has changed. I think most every small town has an addled Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). And then there is the suave Ben (Dean Stockwell), as well as the wholesome Sandy (Laura Dern) contrasted with the femme fatale injured soul of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). So naturally, as a curious youth, I could definitely relate to Kyle MacLachlan’s portrayal of Jeffery Beaumont, caught between the innocence and debauchery of how a small town ticks. This was the world that Mercury Rev wanted desperately to capture in our music, especially on our first two albums, Yerself Is Steam and Boces, with a surface of a fantasy ideal world running concurrently with a darker sexually drug-induced world, and which one is more real? Well, both are!
Video after the jump.
