Intense Records

Born Horses

£18.33 (£21.99 incl. VAT)

LP Tracks: 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

In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskills mountains and the Hudson Valley, a richly swelling, spellbound sound emerges, eddying and fowing like the local Esopus Creek, or in the slipstream of the grander Hudson river, carrying the fotsam 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 fow. 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 linked to their exalted past whilst quite unlike anything they have created before? The answer is somewhere between the homes of founder members Jonathan Donahue (the hamlet of Mt Tremper) and Grasshopper (the town of Kingston), in their veins and brains of their now legendary tapping of musical cosmology, and the vital presence of new permanent member Marion Genser (keys), plus long- term ally Jesse Chandler (keys) and guests Jeff Lipstein (drums), Martin Keith (double bass) and Jim Burgess (trumpet).