Born Horses (LP)

In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley, a richly swelling, spellbound sound emerges, eddying and flowing like the local Esopus Creek, or in the slipstream of the grander Hudson River, carrying the flotsam and jetsam of our hopes, dreams, and 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 flow.

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 begun with skeletal chords and surges of self-reflection, alive to the notions and motions of time and reality somehow both linked to their exalted past whilst quite unlike anything they have created before?''

Grasshopper: "When Jonathan and I first met, one thing we bonded over was Blade Runner, both Ridley Scott's film and Vangelis' soundtrack: that feel of the past and the future, the haunting noir mood and the romance of the future…Born Horses taps into some of that. Looking back to childhood, to Broadway tunes, to lonesome blues, Chet Baker, Miles Davis' Sketches Of Spain, records that our parents listened to, but we put a twist into the future. From the beginning, Mercury Rev were on a cusp, between analogue and digital, hi-fi and lo-fi at the same time. It was like Brecht or Weill, the words suggesting visuals, and the visuals suggesting moods. We also thought a lot about the desert on this record, and the urban desert."

The album title, named after the majestically rippling sixth track 'Born Horses', was chosen because its words resonate through the entire record, encompassing the idea of flight ("I dreamed we were born horses waiting for wings") and the phrase "You and I" that appears at different junctures on the album. This is not the concept of two separate people, but two parts of oneself.