Mercury Rev once set the world afire with its chaotically cosmic psychedelia; now it grandiosely lulls it to sleep. Growing ever more sane, content and financially stable since its 1998 commercial breakthrough,
Deserter's Songs, Mercury Rev has continued to reiterate the widescreen sentimentality of that album with 2001's
All Is Dream and now
The Secret Migration. This is Mercury Rev's most cheerful, conservative album, and therefore its most depressing to fans of mind-scorching early classics like
Yerself Is Steam and
Boces. Most of
Migration's thirteen tracks are elegantly conceived and lushly orchestrated, but thoroughly bland. The plodding yet bombastic rock of "Secret for a Song" sets the template, conjuring mild euphoria tempered with an undertow of melancholy -- like almost every song Mercury Rev's recorded since '98. This upstate New York band's decline is all the more sad for how stratospherically it once soared. Its flame has become an ember.
