Up until very recently, most folks who had undertaken the gargantuan task of compressing a lifetime’s turn-ons and influences into twenty-or-so tracks on one mix-tape record often ran the risk of compromising themselves out of any meaningful plot by having to consider too many challenges: 1) You had to please the label. 2) You had to please the listener. 3) You had to jump through hoops just getting copyright clearance. 4) You had to avoid alienating your fans or embarrassing yourself and your friends in the process. So in place of say, Andy Williams, Petula Clark, Paperlace and Leo Sayer you would settle on something fairly safe and pedestrian and none too credibility sapping, something most folks could agree on was cool, and something that was pretty much guaranteed to shift an extra few copies of the mix-tape disc you were flogging. However, since Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey’s seminal mix-tape album, ‘The Trip’ earlier in the year, artists have been falling over themselves to produce something as kitsch, remote, surprising and unorthodox with their selections as the farthest reaches of time and taste could possibly allow. Sometimes the result comes across as fairly laboured and ingenuine, the selections little more than the wish-list of a terminally conventional and the musically uninformed. And then you get selections like this from Mercury Rev, which demonstrates why Jonathan Donahue, David Baker and the rest always remain ahead of the game, whatever day of the week it is.
Wrapping up the likes of Johan Johannsson’s sparkling instrumental, ‘Hotel Borg’ alongside Terry Jacks immortal kitsch-tragedy, ‘Seasons in the Sun’, Suicide’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’, Galaxie 500’s ‘When Will You Come Home’, Spacemen 3’s lunar modelling ‘Big City’, Alex Chilton’s drippy ‘Let Me Get Close To You’ and Nico’s pricelessly hammy ‘Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams’ is a stroke of genius indeed. And it’s a move that also reveals more than just a little of the source-material and marginalia that inspired albums like ‘Deserters Songs’ and ‘All Is Dream’. They have that same warmth, that same dreaminess, that same silliness and same recursive charm. In fact, it’s a little like having all your Space Christmasses at once, it’s so jingly, serene and gravity-less.
Back To Mine?
On the evidence of this, who would need much persuading?