On Sept. 11, Mercury Rev released the presciently titled album "All Is Dream." It was perfect timing because, although Mercury Rev will never be fashionable, the terrorist attacks on the U.S. must have upped the sales of their albums significantly. Who in America wanted to listen to the abrasive Limp Bizkit or violent Eminem after 5,500 fellow countrymen had just been murdered? It just didn't make sense.
But Mercury Rev, on the other hand, make the best music in the world to feel sad to. If you want to mope about feeling depressed or just have a damn good cry to clear the system, then there is no better musical accompaniment than "All Is Dream" and no better gigs to attend than next month's in Japan. The tears will flow in torrents, believe me, and you'll feel much better afterward.
Sensitive, intelligent, graceful and emotional are the words most frequently used to describe the music of Mercury Rev, and "All Is Dream" carries on where the last album, 1998's superb "Deserter's Songs," left off. Jonathan Donahue's obscure, and often pretentious, love poetry is often as bleak as Nick Cave's or Leonard Cohen's. There's lots of stuff like: "If God moves across the water/Then the girl moves in other ways/And I'm losing sight of either."
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