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Apr 02, 2018 By Christopher Roberts Mercury Rev

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This year Mercury Rev are celebrating the 20th anniversary of arguably their most acclaimed and beloved album, 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. The album topped (or charted high) on many best albums of 1998 lists and immediately went on to influence other acclaimed albums, such as The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin in 1999 and The Delgados’ The Great Eastern in 2000 (both also produced by Mercury Rev’s Dave Fridmann). Mercury Rev recently announced they would be performing Deserter’s Songs at California’s Desert Daze festival in October. Now they have announced some more Deserter’s Songs tour dates late in October. Check out all their tour dates below, followed by the videos for Deserter’s Songs tracks “Goddess on a Highway” and “Opus 40.”

Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue had this to say about Deserter’s Songs in a press release: “By the time we began to surface following the destruction of the mid ‘90s there was no longer anyone of the band ‘in the band.’ It felt as though Grasshopper and I were just these two see-through phantoms banging around at night in my attic, bumping into a melody here and there, strumming on the last of my guitars not in hock, pressing pray and record on the old 8 Track reel to reel. We had no management, no label, no money and to be completely honest, no one clamoring for a new Rev album anywhere in the world. In fact, on the 2-inch tapes during the late recordings Dave Fridmann didn’t write Mercury Rev and instead he used the name Harmony Rockets, a recent experimental side project of ours. The way we saw it, Deserter’s wasn’t going to be our next album… it was going to be our last. And likely only released on cassette to our friends… In fact, the only copy I’ve kept of Deserter’s Songs from that time is on cassette. If anything, these upcoming live shows are by far the closest in spirit and nature to the original writing of that time. Near silent, apprehensive, fragile to the point of ‘touch it and it turns to dust.’ So full of self-doubt. The melancholy many hear on the album went in to album from the start, maybe long before it. Like from a mother to her unborn child, sadness and bewilderment just poured out us and into the album like an open cup.”

Mercury Rev’s latest album, The Light In You, came out in 2015 via Bella Union.

Mercury Rev Tour Dates:

4/12 - Gijon Sound Festival - Gijon, Spain
4/14 - C-Mine Little Waves Festival - Genk, Belgium
4/16 - Wesley Centenary Church - Bangor, UK (Sold Out)
4/17 - Wesley Centenary Church - Bangor, UK (Sold Out)
4/18 - Dolans Warehouse - Limerick, Ireland (Sold Out)
4/19 - Theatre Royal Waterford - Waterford, Ireland
4/20 - Live at St. Lukes - Cork, Ireland (Sold Out)
4/21 - Roisin Dubh - Galway, Ireland (Sold Out)
4/22 - Whelans - Dublin, Ireland (Sold Out)
4/24 - The Tolbooth - Stirling, UK (Sold Out)
4/25 - The Caves - Edinburgh, UK (Sold Out)
4/26 - Tunnels - Aberdeen, UK
4/27 - CCA - Glasgow, UK (Sold Out)
4/29 - Hotel Cecil - Copenhagen, Denmark (Sold Out)
4/30 - Hotel Cecil - Copenhagen, Denmark (Sold Out)
5/1 - Fasching - Stockholm, Sweden
5/2 - John Dee - Oslo, Norway (Sold Out)
10/12-14 - Desert Daze Festival - Lake Perris, CA
10/16 - The Chapel - San Francisco, CA
10/18 - Mississippi Studios - Portland, OR
10/19 - Tractor Tavern - Seattle, WA
10/26 - Music Hall of Williamsburg - Brooklyn, NY

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