• Dream-poppers file for creative bankruptcy.
After a three-year break, veteran psychedelic indie-rock band Mercury Rev return with Snowflake Midnight. Rather than a return to form, though, the album fails to be relevant or interesting on so many levels, it makes Peter Gabriel’s choreographed Segway routine look like high art (seriously, look it up on YouTube).
Snowflake Midnight takes the drifty, dramatic psych-pop template that the band has been refining since the early ’90s and completely throws it away, opting instead for an embarrassingly pedestrian arrangement of electronic beats and tones for each of the nine songs. Not only is the keyboard-orchestrated music not interesting rhythmically, it is also not experimental (unless you count being the first band to badly borrow from the saccharine dopiness of Stars). The bland musicianship renders the moments in which lead singer Jonathan Donahue does not sing (roughly half of the album) about as interesting as the demo compositions that come with Garageband.
Unfortunately, Donahue’s familiar floaty high register fails to produce a single memorable hook or affecting lyric, so by the time you hear the sound of a baby crying, auto-tuned to sound like a melody, it doesn’t seem half as annoying as it really is, because you stopped paying attention four songs ago.
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