Stressful but a happy thing - Mercury Rev’s Boces at 33
Mercury Rev don’t have albums; they have eras. Over their first decade alone, the band lurched from their guitar freak era (Yerself is Steam) to the jazz disgrace period (Boces), to the years of fuzzed-out defiance (See You on the Other Side), landing in 1998 with their heart-breaking Americana epoch (Deserter’s Songs).
Each and every one of these eras has, at some time or other, been my favourite period of Mercury Rev.
For today, though, l want to concentrate on Boces, the band’s exceptionally underrated second album, which is getting a re-issue later this year. I wrote about Boces for The Quietus in 2013, as it celebrated its 20th anniversary, speaking to the band’s first lead singer, the broke-and-burn-the-mould genius that is David Baker.
Something was nagging at my mind, though, and going back into my (surprisingly well organised) archive I found that I had written two versions of the piece, which only slightly overlapped. So, in this month of Boces frenzy - well, it is at my house, anyway - I decided to release this second piece on Substack, updated for 2026. I hope you enjoy it.
“Stressful but a happy thing” - Mercury Rev’s Boces at 33
The influence of jazz on modern indie rock has typically been very limited. Post rock aside, there’s something in the free, improvisational nature of jazz that doesn’t quite fit with punk and indie’s brusque, urgent delivery and dedication to the song.
Mercury Rev - and especially their second album Boces, which celebrates its 33rd anniversary this year - prove the exception to this rule. The band may have covered Miles Davis’ Shhh / Peaceful at early gigs (as found on the Lego My Ego compilation) but it was their second album that really captured the spirit of Davis et al, transporting it to a filthy noise dungeon in New York.
“The Boces album is a group album and it’s not like a group where you worked everything out and then recorded it,” Baker told The Quietus in 2013. “We built it together and it was stressful but that was a happy thing.”
The album essentially takes the already free spirit of the band’s debut Yerself Is Steam and runs with it, expanding their sound into worlds of swinging, chaotic noise that are loosely anchored by one instrument or riff. Instruments - the voice included - are not there to star or stand out. Rather they contribute to the greater, unruly good.
“Jazz is restless,” trombonist J.J. Johnson claimed in a 1988 interview. “It won't stay put and it never will.” This restlessness is Boces writ large. It may not be the best-known of Mercury Rev’s albums but it stands unique in the world of indie rock, an excursion into free-wheeling sound that is unparalleled 33 years on, like a slacker Can or Miles Davis’ electric period with absolutely none of Davis’ innate cool.
The album kicks off with the 10-minute plus epic Meth of a Rockette's Kick, a song that exemplifies this musical restlessness as well as exhibiting two of Mercury Rev’s particular strengths: the ability to build momentum and some excellent backing vocals (these things count).
After drifting in on a wave of harps, acoustic guitars and a riff played on what sounds like a flute (or possibly a French horn), the song alternates peaceful verses - complete with barbershop backing vocals - with horrible guitar freak out choruses.
The loud / quiet trick is hardly a new one. But Meth… is set apart by an alarming attention to detail, with layer upon layer of instrumentation (often barely audible) brought together in a neatly-stitched whole. The song eventually explodes into a rush of brass instrumentation and guitar noise, the flute riff returning periodically to hold the whole operation together. Not a second is wasted.
Trickle Down, which follows, is in essence a guitar song. But it is set apart by a curious – you could say jazz-like – dynamic, which sees the guitars ebb and flow in and out of the mix like waves breaking on the shore, as well as David Baker’s double-tracked vocals, which sound like Can’s Damo Suzuki on the verge of a nervous freak out.
When Baker left Mercury Rev in 1994, with Jonathan Donahue taking over on vocals, the band gained much in terms of straight-up song writing and commercial potential. But they also lost something of the unsettling spirit that made their early recordings so unique, of which Trickle Down is a great example.
There is so much on show in Boces that the guitar avalanche that ends Trickle Down - the wild ferocity of which could put Mercury Rev up with the Sonic Youths of the world - sounds almost incidental to their cause. Trickle Down then gives way to Bronx Cheer, another Sonic Youth-esque moment and possibly the most conventional track on the album (the fact that Donahue sings is no coincidence).
These things are relative though, with Bronx Cheer featuring both frantic cowbell interlude and submerged backing vocals, which don’t so much support the main vocal as subvert it. The song itself is a sublime example of fuzzy guitar pop that would be a highlight on any Dinosaur Jr album. It is also by some distance the most 1993-esque track on Boces, a year that also saw the release of In Utero and Siamese Dream.
The jazz influence that runs through Boces is made explicit on Boys Peel Out. The drums and bass that anchor the track could come from a conventional, if dreamy, work of fifties cool jazz and there is some beautifully understated piano throughout. You suspect, however, that Baker’s rambling vocal style, which seems to alternate between parodying and paying homage to the jazz backing, would have got him thrown out of most jazz clubs of the time.
Throughout Mercury Rev’s career, their music has been marked by a sense of vulnerability. And this is particularly in evidence on Downs Are Feminine Balloons, which rounds off side one of Boces. The song is marked by beautifully restrained guitar work, percussive washes and Suzanne Thorpe’s meandering flute, which resolve into one of the band’s loveliest choruses: “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s up”, a throwaway line that is pushed into melancholy by the subdued vocal delivery. It is a song that seems to wander on the edge of permanent collapse, held together by little more than its own sense of ennui, and is all the better for being so.
By contrast Something For Joey, song one side two, is pure musical joy, a masterful exercise in tension and relief. This song is centred on the chorus, a three-note explosion played out on brass instruments that makes you want to throw your clothes in the air. Around this is a tightly-coiled verse that seems permanently primed to explode in glorious Technicolor pop.
Snorry Mouth, the longest song on the album at almost 11 minutes and the centrepiece of side two, pulls off the same quiet / loud trick as Meth of a Rockette's Kick. But here the atmosphere is different, offset by Sunday night paranoia. Quasi-military snare drums patrol a disparate bunch of instruments on the verse, with Baker’s bugged-out vocals suggesting a man who is too troubled to get out of bed. When the band finally kick in their instruments seem to be in disagreement, their arguments played out in contrasting musical signatures, as opposed to the happy harmony of Something For Joey.
Hi-Speed Boats is the sound of two Mercury Revs meeting, combining the fuzzy guitar pop feel of Bronx Cheer with the layered chaos of Meth of a Rockette's Kick, before giving way to furious 48-second feedback interlude Continuous Drunks and Blunders.
Girlfren, Boces’ final track, doesn’t so much close the record as seduce it to bed by unseemly methods. The song starts with a conventional - and pretty catchy - piano riff, the kind of thing that might anchor an old soul record, which David Baker then proceeds to sleaze all over, interjecting promises to “hold you in my arms” with incoherent mumbling and scat singing of the most disjointed type.
He sounds like the kind of man you’d cross the street to avoid, with the song’s relatively minimal backing - other instruments flit in and out of the mix quietly - forcing the listener to concentrate on his dubious seduction.
There’s just time for a false ending, then 30 seconds of noise and muffled mumbling. And with that the record finishes, bringing to an end not just the album but also a phase in Mercury Rev history: with Baker leaving soon after the album was released (as well as Boces’ apparently turbulent recording) the band rarely played any of these songs live, a considerable shame given Something For Joey’s sheer verve *. “David was looking for a different musical fireplace to sit beside,” as Donahue rather charmingly put it, in a recent interview.
As a result, Boces stands alone and untouched, frozen as an artefact in the Mercury Rev catalogue, a reminder of a difficult time in their history, as well as a reminder of just how insanely creative the New York band could be during their first, frazzled phase.
Speaking to Plane Truth magazine in 1993 about Boces, Baker laid out his dislike for “anti-septic” music. “A lot of the time with records and big budget movies, what they do is anti-septic everything,” he said. “The studio, especially with records, you go and there’s a machine that’s been made, sleek design, carpets on the wall, smelling clean. There’s little gadgets that limit and clean up stuff. That erases any feeling.”
Boces is the polar opposite of this, a thoroughly septic record that oozes with feeling. Boces is overwhelming, chaotic, restless and strange, a freak jazz record in the era of Pearl Jam. Boces doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t fit in; it even used to scare me a little. 33 years on, though, I keep coming back to pick at it a little further, like a dog at a septic bone.
* Rarely. But not never. Setlist.fm says that the band have played Boys Peel Out 26 times live; Downs Are Feminine Balloons and Something for Joey eight time each; Trickle Down five times; and both Meth of a Rockette's Kick and Snorry Mouth one time apiece. You can hear both Something For Joey and Boys Peel Out on the band’s live album Phoenix Festival 93. And I thoroughly recommend you do.
Some listening
Whenever people bemoan the lack of innovation in modern electronic music I tend to think they are looking in the wrong places. Because I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard a great deal of music like Azzi on the Beat, one of the leading lights of Lagos’s mara scene.
Mara, apparently - and I am SO FAR from an expert on this - is an offshoot off Afrobeats that is fast, anarchic and heavily electronic. The upshot of all this on Ginger, Azzi’s recent single, is music that sounds like late 90s commercial trance charging headlong through the streets of Lagos, while people throw samples at it. Ginger is stupidly intense, building to a conclusion of percussive thunder, and yet oddly gentle at the same time, like being attacked by 1,000 clawless kittens.
Goodbye Brain, from Danish artist Fine’s brilliantly titled second album Jazz Dreams, has a melody so perfectly realised you wonder how it was never in your life beforehand, her delivery somewhere in between Nancy Sinatra and Hope Sandoval in the dreamy pop heavens.
Rather brilliantly, the production is both slightly shambling and very lush. The guitar solo that closes the song sounds like it has been rushed off onto Fine’s Voice Notes app in a bid to get the record off to the pressing plant - in a very charming way - but this is clearly a choice because the song is also home to haunting, swopping string arrangements for that full Lee and Nancy impression. Goodbye brain, hello heart.
PS Not many reviews this week as I published a bonus Substack on Friday for paid subscribers, which sucked up most of them.
Some reading
Muriel Rukeyser - Savage Coast
Muriel Rukeyser’s remarkable novel Savage Coast was rejected by her publisher in 1937 and laid, unloved and undiscovered, in a drawer until it was discovered after her death and published in 2013. Her publisher’s feedback - at the same time barely credible and yet all too believable - was that the book contained “one of the worst stretches of narrative I have ever read” and was “a waste of time”.
The real reasons for its rejection, however, probably had more to do with Savage Coast’s sexual content, sympathetic view of communism and Rukeyser’s modernistic writing style, which combines prose with short bursts of poetry and real-life news headlines, a combination that feels fairly unremarkable today but does an excellent job of portraying the surreal situation into which Rukeyser’s protagonist, Helen - a barely disguised version of Rukeyser herself - is thrown.
The novel, which is based on Rukeyser’s own experiences, takes place during the first five days of the Spanish Civil War. Helen - as Rukeyser did - travels to Barcelona to cover the Olimpiada Popular, only to get stuck in Montcada as the war starts and a General Strike is declared. She meets a German athlete, falls in love and eventually makes it to Barcelona, where she spends a couple of days in the war-scarred city before the Olimpiada is cancelled.
But it’s not so much what Helen does that is fascinating; rather it is the way Rukeyser - a very gifted poet - traces the confusion and fear of the Civil War, relating Helen’s experiences as they happen, with little or no colouring in from later experience. It’s like you’re stuck in Montcada with Helen, wondering whether the plane that flies over head is going to be friend or foe and how you are going to get food that evening. It’s a fascinating, frightening immersive experience.
Rukeyser has a gift of subtly portraying the people she meets and the mental cacophony of their diverse concerns: the American communist who seems invigorated by the war; the English tennis player whose main concern is the lack of balls; the Hollywood producers who can’t s believe that something this uncouth would happen to them; the terrified New Jersey house wife; the Catalan mother who snatches looted goods from her young child; Helen’s German lover, who is exiled from his homeland; and so on.
If Rukeyser doesn’t quite give the same attention to the locals in Montcada and Barcelona this is forgivable: she traces her world, as she lived it and does so with astounding skill.
And with remarkable poeticism too. I read the book in Catalan (it was a birthday present) so much of this passed me by but I investigated later and some of the writing is sublime. “The compartment was a thin crate of heat, tranced by the sun. The excitement of the Catalan women had kept it alive; now it became stale, filled with dense noon and silent.” Or “His long face was like intellectual metal, yellow and refined sharp; and further lengthened by the high V of baldness which ate into the fair hair, baring the skull ridges.”
Savage Coast is a remarkable book: beautiful, terrifying, intense and deeply moving, the horrifying, savage uncertainty of war writ large in graceful poetic strokes.
Things I’ve done
This week Jersey Club queen UNIIQU3 returns to the Line Noise podcast to celebrate the forthcoming release of her debut album Mass Appeal. We talked about supporting Beyoncé, Jersey Club going global, airports, having mass appeal, world building, bass line, bangers and more, in a very charming, in-depth interview
Line Noise Files 2 - Fatboy Slim’s better Living Through Chemistry
In the second episode of the Line Noise FilesI make a confession about one of the most love-hated dance music producers of the 1990s: Norman Cook AKA Fatboy Slim and his sparkling debut album Better Living Through Chemistry.ttps://soundcloud.com/line-noise-podcast/line-noise-285-uniiqu3-on-her
The playlists
I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.
Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026
Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026
Apple Music: The newest and the bestest
Spotify: The newest and the bestest
