20

Mercury Rev
The Secret Migration

We start with a bit of a guilty pleasure. I didn’t know that much about Mercury Rev at the start of the year, other than that they had been around a while. Got into them after buying this for £3 on a trip to Cambridge in the autumn (having heard my lovely hosts playing an earlier album by them). It’s twee and syrupy, but well crafted and very infectious. The basis of Mercury Rev’s sound is their bass lines, which are fairly simple but burrow into your brain. Consistent throughout, with each track offering a lovely shiny trinket that burrows into your brain and won’t go away.

The lyrics are uniformly cringe-worthy (“on a wave of emotion/sending ships across the ocean” - yuck). The album cover is revoltingly mauve. Objectively I have no idea how this makes it onto this list: it is just here because I keep playing it and keep enjoying it, despite feeling like I should by rights hate it.

On the whole this is not ‘cool’ in the slightest. It has a number of significant shortcomings. But I like it and I don’t care. So there.