After playing with the local Buffalo groups the People's Front and Sunny in Chernobyl in the early '80s, Grasshopper began playing bass with Shady Crady, an avant-garde band who also included Donahue among their members, while pursuing a B.A. As a child, Grasshopper studied clarinet and loved jazz artists like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Miles Davis later, when he began playing guitar, he drew from classic rockers such as Neil Young and the Allman Brothers as well as the Velvet Underground's Sterling Morrison and Television's Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. As they continued to evolve with 2008's electronic Snowflake Midnight and paid homage to one of the great underappreciated albums with 2019's Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited, heartfelt emotion and experimentation remained equally vital to Mercury Rev's music.įormed out of the experimental art and music scene at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the late '80s, Mercury Rev originally featured vocalist David Baker, vocalist/guitarist Jonathan Donahue, guitarist/clarinetist Grasshopper (born Sean Mackowiak), flutist Suzanne Thorpe, bassist Dave Fridmann, and drummer Jimy Chambers. Though Mercury Rev won critical acclaim from the start, they didn't achieve commercial success until their 1998 breakthrough album, Deserter's Songs, which combined intimate songwriting with a fresh take on Americana. As their lineup changed, their musical horizons expanded on 1995's See You on the Other Side, they added adventurous free jazz excursions and lullaby-like melodies with striking results.

The volatility of the group's early days likely added an extra spark to the one-of-a-kind mix of shoegaze, noise pop, psychedelic, and experimental music on 1991's Yerself Is Steam and 1993's Boces, which offered the first hint of just how ambitious their music became later in the decade. Beginning as avant-pop pranksters and evolving into purveyors of rootsy, majestic psych-pop, Mercury Rev aren't so much a band as a long, strange trip.

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