In slight retrospect it wasn’t totally surprising that Mercury Rev would sound the way it did out of the gate given their connection to the Flaming Lips’s already weird and wild approach, but the Rev had already started their own weird thing on their own and went for it – and then some. Yerself Is Steam, a chaotic ‘rock’ album that sounded almost like nothing on earth in 1991, at least in the Anglosphere, was a grand statement of purpose, from the zone of “Frittering” to the howling manias of “Syringe Mouth” and the epic feeling of “Very Sleepy Rivers.”

– Ned Raggett