Album Review: Mercury Rev - The Secret Migration.

It’s time for some critical honesty: I’d never heard a Mercury Rev album before listening to The Secret Migration. Sure, they’d occasionally popped up as minor blips on my cultural radar, making seemingly ubiquitous appearances on chill-out mixes, but none of their records had ever been slipped into my CD player.

Which, it seems, was a mistake. As opening track, Secret For A Song, began building in my headphones, like the little, less esoteric brother of Kid A, I realised why this old band from Buffalo, New York were so often lauded by punters and critics alike. On a cloudy Monday morning, with dew on the windows and birds chirping, this was exactly what I wanted to hear.

Snaking, climbing, falling, New Order basslines. Nigh-bombastic drums reverberating in the middle of my head. High, searching vocals. The music rising and building, and then crashing down suddenly. Floating and swimming and lying on the grass on an Autumn day. This is headphone music that seems happy to slide into your ears, languidly stumbling on to a bed in the middle of your brain, curling up and singing to the ceiling.

Indeed. The Secret Migration is simultaneously relaxing and moving. You can see why the Rev have made their way on to the Sunday morning playlists of drug pig clubbers coming down from nasty coke and dubious E, but they offer more than the downbeat, chilled-out predictability of the usual Café Del Mar pap.

Contemporary touchstones abound: the technoblips of The Notwist, the heavy piano of a relaxed Soulwax, a little of the drama of Radiohead, the pomp of Muse. Mercury Rev aren’t as interesting or surprising as these European Sensations, but their predictability, oddly, works for them. They instantly lull you into a comfort zone, but they never stumble into the mindless, tossed-off formulas of Coldplay.

In The Wilderness shows them at their best, pumping and surging, the drums sporadically thumped, pushing their way towards the end of the track. The track builds, and falls, and suddenly stops for the vocals – ‘how can the woman I love be so strong?’ – and it all starts again.

The album won’t set the world on fire, and nor does it want to. It offers nothing more than a place to be at dawn and dusk, and a mood to feel when you don’t know where you are. It’s lovely and sweet. Album closer Down Poured The Heavens is suitably divine, a lullaby in the tradition of The Smiths’ Asleep. And, on a cloudy Monday morning, it’s exactly what you’ll want to hear.

(Originally published at fasterlouder.com.au).

Politics: Throwing In The Towel.

I’m totally giving up.

Yes, it’s time for the obligatory left-wing whinge where I claim I’m going to be totally apathetic about politics. Indeed, it’s time to toss in my ideological towel and spend my days just making cash money, downing schooners, discussing how hot chicks are and occasionally buying Ikea furniture.

Wouldn’t that be good? I’d like it. I’d adore nothing more than not giving too shits about underprivileged children, or people dying in under-funded hospitals, or fucking Somalians dying of hunger and Rwandans being massacred. Then I could just concentrate on relaxing in a magical middle-class world where fairies of industry provide economic incentive to li’l worker gremlins to work harder and faster, and unicorns made of low interest rates gallop across the beautiful plains of wealth and prosperity.

I could secretly support George W. Bush, and I’d never have to waste my time going to a rallies organised by do-gooder, politically correct, inoffensive geeks like Resistance. I could support the war on terror, anxiously waiting for the USA to spread liberty and peace to North Korea, Iran and hey, maybe that Lebanese family that lives down the road from me. If I’d given up on being a left-wing geek a while ago, I could’ve giggled with delight when Saddam was captured. I could’ve demanded vicious, cruel retribution – right now! - when the twin towers collapsed.

How much easier do conservatives have it? Abortions are gross… let’s ban them! Drugs make people look gross… let’s ban them! Poor kids probably smell like poo… let’s ban them from universities and cut off their parents’ welfare payments too!

I’m getting tired of all this reading, this philosophy, this intellectualism, this yearning for equality, justice and all those other tired clichés. I’m never going to pay to see a Michael Moore film again.

Indeed. It’s all a bit of a wank, this left-wing game. It’s full of uppity self-righteousness, unnecessary political correctness and terrible liberal guilt. It requires going to demonstrations and discussing things at length and – most taxing of all – genuinely wanting the world to be a better place.

So I’m out of it. I’m never reading Marx again. I’m going to start slagging off Gough Whitlam. I’m going to start voting for the Liberal party. I’m developing a healthy disrespect for immigrants and people from other cultures. Oh, it really will be something. I’ll be living the fucking life.

Until a couple of days pass, and Labor elects a new leader, and I get all excited about the prospects of an Australia that isn’t so completely embarrassing. And then, predictably, I’ll be back here, writing yet another column where I slag off the Liberal party – and most of those who vote for them – as vicious little deviants hellbent on the destruction of our nation. Of course.

(Originally published in The Brag in the Fear & Loathing column).

(Photo: Republican mastermind Karl Rove, renowned kitten-hater).