Mercury Rev – Yerself Is Steam (1991)
Mercury Rev’s debut album is probably the most impressive album the band ever produced, not to mention one of the most eccentric psychedelic expeditions since The Soft Machine’s Third twenty years prior. The sheer epic-scale of Yerself Is Steam is incomparable to the later work of Mercury Rev, who after several changes of band members managed to lose their most magical quality. Thankfully, their original brilliance can still be witnessed in this album, which is as accessible as it is extraordinary.
The album evokes a sort of grunge-ness, but not the kind you may expect to recognise. Unlike Dinosaur Jr or Sonic Youth, the album is not weighed down with grunge allusions; instead it is a reflection on loneliness, adventure, boredom and stardom, as interpreted by the truly unique soundscapes the band evoke. Each composition commences and concludes like a teenage memory, despite the band’s varying use of genre and style, which adds a playful spontaneity to the dreamy dynamics.
The opening track, Chasing a Bee begins as though everything has already concluded, but quickly establishes the Himalayan-sized scope of the album. Beautiful and harsh at the same time, it is a spiralling expression of superfluous energy, both personal and interplanetary. Syringe Mouth has the aesthetic of a punk song put through some kind of Hendrix-ian torture chamber, while Coney Island Cyclones has all the charm of a surrealist trip through the Bermuda Triangle.
The mind-bending tracks that remain will have to be discovered by listeners themselves, as they border on the indescribable. Nevertheless, the lasting impression Yerself Is Steam leaves on your subconscious, is a resounding sense of recovering something lost, or remembering something long forgotten. However you choose to interpret it, Yerself Is Steam is a significant contribution to the school of psychedelic rock as much as it is one of the most creative rock albums of the nineties.
