Forty Six Minutes Of Hope Sandoval

Hope Sandoval has one of those voices. It almost goes without saying. She sounds as if she's halfway between sleep and being awake, an effortless, soothing, narcotic tone, a heavy lidded half sigh. Born to Mexican- American parents, who split up when she was young, Hope struggled at school and dropped out, largely spending her teens at home listening to records. 

Hope and Dave Roback (who died of cancer in 2020) formed Mazzy Star in 1988 when the band they were in, Opal, lost its singer. Mazzy Star went on hiatus in 1997 and Hope formed The Warm Inventions with My Bloody Valentine's drum Colm O'Ciosoig, releasing three album. Mazzy Star reunited in 2016. Hope's voice has featured on loads of records with other people- The Chemical Brothers, Mercury Rev, Bert Jansch, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Massive Attack, Death In Vegas, Vetiver, Air and Le Volume Courbe have all benefited from her vocals. I could have done this mix twice given the sheer number of songs by her two bands and all those guest appearances. 

Forty Six Minutes Of Hope Sandoval

• Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions: Into The Trees
• Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions: Suzanne
• The Chemical Brothers with Hope Sandoval: Asleep From Day
• Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions: Wild Roses
• Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions: On The Low
• Mazzy Star: Blue Flower
• Mercury Rev with Hope Sandoval: Big Boss Man
• Mazzy Star: Fade Into You
• Mazzy Star: Five String Serenade
• Mazzy Star: Happy

Into The Trees is a long piece of music from her third album as Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions from 2016, Until The Hunter. Hope and My Bloody Valentine's drummer Colm O'Ciosoig recorded the album in various locations including a Martello Tower in Dublin, which had a natural reverb caused by the circular Napoleonic period room of the tower. Hope plays organ, a two chord drone and Colm plays gentle tumbling drums. Hope sings gently over the top and it all goes on softly and slowly for nine minutes.

Suzanne is from the first Warm Inventions album, Bavarian Fruit Bread, released in 2001. Hope and Colm recruited several guests for the album, including Bert Jansch. It came out a month after the 9/ 11 attacks and like all albums released in the wake of that event, it seemed to have something to say on the matter even though it was clearly recorded months prior to it. The fragile, narcotic tone of the album, a numbed out response to the world, minimal and spooked. It's difficult not to associate Hope's Suzanne with Leonard Cohen's Suzanne. On The Low is also from Bavarian Fruit Bread, an album that opens with a cover of The Jesus And Mary Chain's Drop. I vividly remember buying it on release in November 2001 and playing it on a Sunday evening while getting mentally prepared for the week ahead at work and the two sides/ twelve songs being quite the Sunday night experience. 

In 1999 The Chemical Brothers put out Surrender, probably their third album and for me their most complete and satisfying record. It came packed with guest vocalists- Bernard Sumner, Noel Gallagher, Jonathan Donahue and Hope Sandoval. Hope's vocal on Asleep From Day is the perfect accompaniment to the album's most blissed out track, a song that sounds like the space between sleep and dreams.

Wild Roses is from the second Warm Inventions album, from 2009- Through The Devil Softly. It had a slightly fuller sound than the first album, a fleshed out band feel, partly possibly due to its recording being interrupted by Colm going on tour with My Bloody Valentine. The arrangements are more complex and intricate, there's a lot more going on. Still as beguiling and bewitching as ever and Hope's voice still sounds like the one you want to hear as you're drifting off to sleep. 

Blue Flower is from Mazzy Star's debut, She Hangs Brightly, from 1990. Hope and Dave Roback formed Mazzy Star as the previous band they were in, Opal, broke up and Blue Flower carried over. It's a cover of a Slapp Happy song from 1972. Mazzy Star released it as their first single in August 1990. It's far more guitar/ third Velvets album sounding than the dreamy sound they developed into- in fact it could easily be on The Mary Chain's Darklands. 

Big Boss Man is from a 2019 album Mercury Rev recorded, a cover/ re- imagining of Bobby Gentry's The Delta Sweete album from 1968. Mercury Rev enlisted a cast of female vocalists including Hope and Rachel Goswell, Latitia Sadier, Vashti Bunyan, Lucinda Williams and Beth Orton.

Fade Into You is from 1993's So Tonight That I Might See, Mazzy Star's second album. You don't need to me tell you how great Fade Into You is- one oft he best indie/ dreampop songs of the 1990s/ all time. Inexplicably good- Hope's voice, the acoustic guitars, the electric guitar topline, the brushed drums, the sense that the song is really just one huge sigh, the feeling of dissolving into another person that comes with young love. 

Five String Serenade is also from So Tonight That I Might See- an album that blurs the lines between country, indie, psychedelia and dreampop, everything soaked in a narcotic, hallucinogenic gauze. It was written by Arthur Lee of Love. 

Happy is from 1996's Among My Swan, Mazzy Star flirting with the mainstream, MTV, Batman soundtracks and all the rest that fame and a hit single, Fade Into You, brings. 

Yes, I should have included Paradise Circus, the song she did with Massive Attack and also should  have finished this mix with Sometimes Always, the song she sang with The Jesus and Mary Chain in 1994. To make up for its absence, here's Hope and Reids live in TV in the mid- 90s. 

A Brand New Moon Is Born

I was in two minds about going to see Mercury Rev at New Century Hall last Friday night. A friend who saw them in Dublin last year said they were a bit hit and miss and the album, Born Horses, has some good songs on it and some I'm less sure about. But, I've been playing the pair of late 20th and early 21st century albums that are probably their peak- Deserter's Songs and All Is Dream- a lot recently and the possibility of seeing those songs played live was very tempting. My brother was keen, several friends were going and there were some tickets left so I took the risk and it more than paid off. Mercury Rev were on fire and as they wend their way across the country this month anyone going to any of the other dates is in for a good evening. 

The two core members, singer/ guitarist Jonathan Donohue and guitarist Grasshopper, have been joined by a new piano/ sax/ flute player Jesse Chandler and keys player Marion Genser plus a drummer (set up at the side of the stage) who loves the motorik kraut rhythms. They arrived on stage one by one, picking their way into the ambient soundscape of The Little Bird. Donohue arrives, very much the frontman, theatrical hand gestures and long cuffs sticking out from under his black jacket and then they burst into Tonite It Shows. From that point on their homebrewed combination of 1940s Disney soundtracks, 60s psychedelia, 90s alt- rock, their own weird Baroque Americana, long drawn out Tangerine Dream style sections and bursts of twin guitar, everyone playing everything together and really loudly, really hits home. 

Halfway through, after a run of psychedelic torch songs, Jonathan leans into to the mic and starts speaking Rutger Hauer's famous lines from Blade Runner, 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, I've watched C- Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate... all these things will be lost in time... like tears in rain'. Jesse gets the sax out and they play a full cover of Vangelis' Tears In Rain from the Blade Runner soundtrack that drifts by beautifully. Then the dive into Goddess On A Hiway, blasting into the chorus with the lines 'And I know it ain't gonna last/ When I see your eyes arrive/ They explode like two bugs on glass...

Goddess On A Hiway

The second half of the set is perfectly weighed- Ancient Love from Born Horses, a song with a lengthy spoken word section inspired by the words of Robert Creeley and sumptuous, orchestral early 70s easy listening.

Tides Of The Moon from All Is Dream is followed by the always powerful Holes from Deserter's Songs, a song that still startles not least the bit where the band drop down and Donohue sings, 'Holes/ Dug by little moles/ Angry jealous spies/ They got telephones for eyes'. And then Opus 40, a song seemingly inspired equally by 1920s cinema and wasted 60s cosmic psychedelia, the existential lyric 'I'm alive she cried but I don't know what it means' at its heart. 'Tears in waves/ Minds on fire'. Donohue is conducting the band, throwing his arms out left and right. Finally the play The Dark Is Rising, the huge, emotive and affecting opening song from 2001's All Is Dream, a song about love and loss set to a grand swell of orchestral psychedelia, Jonathan crooning 'In my dreams I'm always strong'. I'm sure I can't be the only person wiping their eyes.  

The Dark Is Rising

The band start to wind the song down, Jonathan departs, the musicians leave one by one and that's it, no encore, the songs played almost without a gap between them, one becoming the next and fading out as they faded in ninety minutes earlier. 

The two pictures above are mine. This one is from the band's Facebook page taken by Vittorio Bongiorno.

Forty Five Minutes Of Mercury Rev

Mercury Rev had a brief flurry of fame/ renown in 1989- 1991, often in conjunction with fellow travellers The Flaming Lips. In 1993 founder member David Baker left the group and Jonathan Donohue and Sean Grasshopper Mackowiac carried on, playing experimental psychedelic rock until they collapsed in 1996/7. Grasshopper retreated to a Jesuit guest house in upstate New York while Donahue sat around listening to children's music and playing melodies on a piano. He was invited to play with The Chemical Brothers on the track that became The Private Psychedelic Reel and when he returned to the US contacted Grasshopper and from all the wreckage- debt, psychedelic and experimental rock that made them a cult band but seemed to be bus constantly hurtling out of control, drugs, lost members and management, depression, broken relationships- they regrouped in the Catskill Mountains pulled the songs that became Deserter's Songs into being. Deserter's Songs is one of the best albums of the 90s, a heartfelt, concise, weirdly affecting record that harks back to the songs of the 1930s and '40s. It also featured a pair of musicians from The Band, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson. Garth died two weeks ago, the last survivor of the men who made Big Pink. 

RIP Garth Hudson.

Last year Mercury Rev released an album called Born Horses, an album I bought and which divides me- half of it I don't like at all, easy listening pastiche with Donahue abandoning his upper register  singing for something deeper and half of it I really like, a few genuinely revelatory songs a bout birds and horses that are like nothing else. 

For this Sunday mix I've focussed mainly on the years 1998- 2004 and the trio of albums they made in those years- Deserter's Songs, 2001's stunning All Is Dream and 2004's mixed bag The Secret Migration. These three, well the first two, are albums that everyone should own and which bear repeat playing. I don't know if the end of the century/ millennium things was a factor in their creation but it seems like a good story, that pre- millennial uncertainty fed into Deserter's Songs, sent them back into America's weird past, and the new century gifted them All Is Dream. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Mercury Rev

• The Dark Is Rising
• Holes
• Observatory Crest
• Endlessly
• Tides Of The Moon
• Diamonds
• Opus 40
• Delta Blues Bottleneck Sun (Chemical Brothers Remix)
• Dream On

The Dark Is Rising is the opening song on 2001's All Is Dream, a song infused with both fragility and strength, in those huge Hollywood strings, a piccolo and Donahue's so human voice. It's a late night, freak- you- out song that in some ways has become mixed up with my feelings about Isaac's death, my grief and especially those mornings when I wake up having dreamt about him. 'I dreamed of you on my farm/ I dreamed of you in my arms/ But my dreams are always wrong', are the lines that hit me. 'I always dreamed I'd love you/ I never dreamed I'd lose you' too. A friend who has been through a similar experienced pointed me to the end of the song though and the last line- 'In my dreams I'm always strong'- and I started to see it differently. Tides Of The Moon is from the same album, an album that closes with the seven minutes epic Hercules which I tried to fit in here too and failed. 

Holes opens Deserter's Songs, a truly stunning piece of music, orchestral pop with a saw wobbling its way through it and Donahue's voice and lyrics, not least the break down and extraordinary moment where he sings, 'Holes/ Dug by little moles/ Angry jealous spies/ Got telephones for eyes', and makes it sound deeply profound. 'How does that old song go?'

Observatory Crest is a cover of a 1974 Captain Beefheart song, recorded for a 2001 Peel Session and included on the 2006 compilation Stillness Breathes, complete with birdsong. 

Endlessly is from Deserter's Songs too. I could have included Goddess On A Hiway instead. Both are highlights from an album packed with them. Endlessly seemed to fit with the feel better, the sound of the 1940s cinema/ 1890s theatre/ psychedelic Willy Wonka/ late 90s alt- rock crossover. 

Opus 40 is also from Deserter's Songs, possibly its peak, tripped out psychedelic/ silver screen freakery with the line, 'I'm alive she cried but I don't know what it means', as fine an eleven word summation of the human condition as any.  

Diamonds is from The Secret Migration, released in January 2005, an album that flirted with Tolkien- esque imagery and which was probably a few songs too long, a song of nature, love and devotion.

Delta Blues Bottleneck Stomp was an upbeat way to end Deserter's Song (apart from the hidden track that came after it), a joyous harpsichord/ piano riff that sounded like they'd heard it on a late 80s house record and repurposed it for an album recorded in the woods of upstate New York by men dressed in late 19th century clothes with two former members of The Band. The Chemical Brothers repaid the favour Donahue had done for them on The Private Psychedelic Reel by remixing it, one of their best. 

Donahue also sang on Dream On, the closing song from The Chemical Brothers' 1997 album Surrender, an album not short of guest vocalists- Bernard Sumner, Noel Gallagher and Hope Sandoval all show up. Dream On is a sleepy, half asleep, blissed out and gently building psychedelic finale, and in some way completes this mix by going back to the start, a dream sequence. It also has a false ending and after a period of silence the song wakes up again briefly.

The Dark Is Rising

I can start to feel November's presence bearing down on me. Isaac's birthday was/ is the 23rd and the anniversary of his death comes a week later on the 30th. The first November after he died, November 2022, was awful, the anniversaries coming thick and fast and then going straight into December and everything that that month brings. Last year's November was no better and in some ways maybe worse. The passing of time, one year since he died, then two, and now, in November 2024, it will be three years. In some ways it doesn't seem feasible that it can already be three years since he was last with us but time keeps marching on and he slips a little further into the past every day, getting further away in little ways all the time. Three years on I can think of him and smile now which hasn't always been the case in the time since he died- sometimes it was impossible to think of him and it not be painful so I guess that's some kind of progress- but I'm not looking forward to November and can feel it already casting a shadow. 

In September 1998 Mercury Rev released an album which completely changed their world- Deserter's Songs. Coincidentally this was just two months before Isaac was born. Deserter's Songs was the group's fourth album but it brought them success and renown they'd never had before, an album of perfectly played and sung songs that mixed end of the century fragilities and anxieties, the Catskills mountains, whispered psychedelic poetry, the old weird America that Bob Dylan and Greil Marcus talked about, and baroque chamber pop, made by a group recovering from breakdowns, addiction and break ups. It was a rebirth and is one of those albums that never seems to age or fade or lose its power and appeal. 

In 2001 Mercury Rev followed Deserter's Songs with All Is Dream, a less fragile and more confident record but one still shot through with a certain amount of dread. It opens with The Dark Is Rising, a song that sets out like a 1950s Hollywood blockbuster with huge sweeping strings and then lonely piano. Jonathan Donahue starts singing in that reedy, upper register voice about dreams and loss and bridges burned. The Dark Is Rising is about a lover who has gone but Jonathan has a kind of certainty in the song, he welcomes the darkness because he can hear them, 'somewhere in this song'. The strings and timpani crash back in and a ghostly voice wails away in the background. It's strong stuff- I recall listening to it in 2001 and being quite freaked out by it. 

The Dark Is Rising

The last verse goes like this-

'I dreamed that I was walking and the two of us were talking/ Of all life's mystery/ The words that flow between friends/ Winding streams without end/ I wanted you to see

But it can seem surprising/ When you find yourself alone
And now the dark is rising/ And a brand new moon is born

I always dreamed I'd love you/ I never dreamed I'd lose you/ In my dreams I'm always strong'

My dreams have been all over the place for a long time now, made more vivid and disturbed by the statins I've been taking for over a year now. Isaac has been appearing more and more regularly in them. After he died, when he appeared in my dreams he was always 23, the age he was when he died. Now when I dream about him he's often much younger. I don't what that means or if it means anything. I'm not sure what The Dark Is Rising means for me either but its been playing in my mind a lot as September has turned into October and November has begun to show its face. And as Jonathan sings in The Dark Is Rising, 'dreams don't last for long'. 

A Bird Of No Address

Oh my. Mercury Rev have returned with some songs ahead of a new album, Born Horses, next month. This song is the third so far, and was released two weeks ago, A Bird Of No Address, a song that is both huge and universal while also sounding personal and inward looking. There are sweeping orchestral strings, flourishes of baroque sound, piano and timpani, and Jonathan Donahue's part sung, part whispered, part gasped vocals spinning truths and tales. Magical, spellbinding modern psychedelia. 

When I See Your Eyes Arrive

Back in 1998 as the decade and century rushed to a conclusion people started fretting about Y2K, the millennium bug and aeroplanes dropping out of the sky. Mercury Rev had been a minor US alt- rock band with some major drug problems and poor sales and were about to be dropped. Their manager left and the drummer followed. Jonathan Donahue slipped into depression and took refuge in childhood favourites, fairy tales set to classical music. From this chaos and dissolution came Deserter's Songs, an album that turned out to be one of 1998's best records. 

Holed up in the Catskill Mountains, writing on a piano and reconnecting with guitarist Grasshopper, sharing studio time with The Flaming Lips (a band Donahue was a member of at the same time) they began to record the songs that would become Deserter's Songs, a fragile, melodic, gently wasted album, filled with acts of leaving, with ghosts and farewells. They both assumed this would be Mercury Rev's last throw of the dice. Somehow during the sessions the band/ duo signed to V2 and the money that followed allowed them to complete the album, filling the songs out with Dave Fridman, adding strings, horns, woodwind. This song, originally written by Donahue back in 1989, was found on an old cassette and reworked...

Goddess On A Hiway

There's a back to the land/ get our heads together in the country/ Bob Dylan after his motorcycle crash feel to Deserter's Songs. Add in to the fin de siecle vibe circulating by 1998, replacing all that mid 90s confidence. 'I got us on a highway/ I got us in a car', Jonathan sings, leaving somewhere. Later on in the songs it's about her, 'the goddess on a highway/ goddess in a car', leaving. 'And I know it ain't gonna last'. The rest of the album sounds similarly blasted and wrecked, the sound of some people trying to hold it together- Holes, Tonite It Shows, Opus 40, Hudson Line. At the end the final song opens with what sounds like a house music piano riff being played on a harpsichord, the final splendour of Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp. 

Before he started writing the songs for the album Donahue had been approached by The Chemical Brothers to play on what would become The Private Psychedelic Reel. At a time when he'd more or less given up and hit the bottom, the request and recording re- energised him. In the UK, Deserter's Songs was then championed by Tom and Ed, especially in the NME and Melody Maker, and it all took off. The NME made it album of the year, the monthlies gave it five stars. The Chemical Brothers provided a remix adding their crunching 90s swirl of FX and beats to Mercury Rev's 19th century chamber music- and picking out the word that is the opposite of the album's main lyrical themes- 'hello...' 

Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp (The Chemical Brothers Remix)

Sliding Away In A Washed Out Delta Sun

Mercury Rev's 1997 album Deserter's Songs came out of nowhere, and sounded like it came out of the middle of nowhere. The final track, Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp, is a Bagging Area favourite. It manages to marry harpsichord with house-y chords, slightly desperate vocals and an end-of-night feeling. Magical really.

In other news, I'm off to Finland until Friday (with work, and responsibility for several minors), which is a little bizarre. I don't tend to get much work related foreign travel, but the chance to spend a few days in a country about which I know little and am unlikely to go to otherwise seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Back on Friday when I'll let you know what life is like on the edge of Europe.

Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp

While The City Was Busy We Wanted A Rest

Mercury Rev recorded at the BBC's Maida Vale studio in 1999 for a Peel Session, with a lovely laidback cover of Captain Beefheart's Observatory Crest, perfect for this time on a Sunday when the light's gone, and 'Monday's coming like a jail on wheels'.

03 Observatory Crest.wma