Live music review: Mercury Rev at the Button Factory, Dublin

3/5

Life is full of surprises – but not when attending a Mercury Rev gig. Framed by dry ice and stark stage lights, in the flesh these craggy veterans fully inhabit their status as alternative rock’s pre-eminent tree huggers.

That’s especially true of frontman Jonathan Donahue, a crinkled 49-year-old with the wispy body language of an extra from an especially saturnine production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner recently, Donahue explained that Mercury Rev’s music is indebted to the mystery and beauty of his native Catskill Mountains in New York state. The sensibility came through unambiguously at the Button Factory, as the band put in powerfully, and sometimes exhaustingly, ethereal performance. On opener ‘Queen Of Swans’, for instance, Donahue delivered nonsense-rhyme lyrics that might have originated in a late 19th century children’s novel as the musicians, led by guitarist Seán “Grasshopper” Mackowiak, churned out feedback.

More venerable tracks, meanwhile, were adapted to the group’s present headspace, with the originally jerky ‘Car Wash Hair’ (from 1991) recast as pantheist dirge.

The shadow of Deserter’s Songs, Mercury Rev’s best and most popular album, hung heavily. Donahue has stated that new LP The Light In You, was the first project where he explicitly acknowledged the legacy and influence of that 1998 opus — and he’s correct, thought not necessarily in a positive sense, with the dreary ‘Autumn’s In The Air’ and ‘Are You Ready?’ suggesting watery retreads of ideas already fully articulated a decade earlier.

The suspicion was confirmed as Donahue and lieutenants retreated to their late 90s/early 2000s pomp, via the twinkling ‘Holes’ (only Mercury Rev could get away with a line as twee as “holes, dug by little moles”) and the closing double punch of ‘Goddess on a Highway’ and ‘The Dark Is Rising’, which cumulatively suggested excerpts from a rock opera adaptation of Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen.

The problem is that these moments are so perfect that when Mercury Rev try to replicate the magic elsewhere the results inevitably underwhelm.