Whether it was a label change, a deep rethink or – thanks to Dave Fridmann’s double duty as a bandmember and as the Flaming Lips producer-for-life – a sense of the aesthetic stars aligning, with Deserter’s Songs Mercury Rev set the course for the rest of their artistic life. Caught somewhere between the strange fragility of prime Supertramp and their sense of a multilayered ‘America’ that’s a state of mind – and helped by Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of The Band as well – on songs like “Holes,” “Goddess on a Hiway” and “Endlessly” they captured an epic melancholy.

– Ned Raggett