Pitchfork

Chicks. I mean, what's up with them? There's one outside my window right now, down on the concrete, in the arms of some big, oily brute, passive and seemingly content. But the thing with me and chicks isn't just that they're virtually always down there when I'm up here. The thing that gets me is that the guy she's with doesn't know any better than I do what's going on inside her head. As much as he smiles and nods along when she moves her mouth, no male will ever truly understand what females are ultimately up to. I can only guess that she stopped out there because she was drawn to the sweet pop music dripping from my stereo like an ant stuck in a puddle of honey.

At least, this is how frustrated hetero males have been thinking for as long as the thoughts of frustrated hetero males have been recorded. Inked on papyrus, set in type, expressed in terms of humors, temperatures, and tides, and eventually grooved onto vinyl, it's a piggish sentiment backed by libido and ignorance (and more than a little unfair to women). It's also, oddly enough, a sentiment that's been the motivating force behind a great deal of beauty, most notably in pop music (possibly the greatest repository for male frustration ever created). Much of the time, male pop is trying to both seduce and explain the opposite sex in the same instant, knowing all the while that one of these objectives is a lost cause.

Mercury Rev's All Is Dream claims its share of pop brilliance by taking up this position with enormous reserves of intelligence, grace, and emotion. As long-time Rev flautist Suzanne Thorpe-- who's been with the band since their sprawling psych-noise days-- has been demoted to the orchestra pit for this release, the band is now all-male. With Dave Fridmann mainly taking the role of expert producer (and making contributions on bass and mellotron) and Jimy Chambers passing the sticks on to new drummer Jeff Mercel, the core group is possibly the most stripped-down line-up in Mercury Rev's 10-year recording history. Though their approach hasn't changed from the radically orchestral turn of 1998's Deserter's Songs, these songs are far more personal than their last set.

Even when bathed in Jonathan Donahue's constant wash of fever-dream lyrics, it's clear that these are Mercury Rev's first real (though predictably odd) love songs. "If God moves across the water/ Then the girl moves in other ways/ And I'm losing sight of either," he sings in "Nite And Fog," his collapsing love story gently suspended above its lyrical melancholy by the song's flowing strings and Fridmann's buoyant bassline. Throughout the album, Donahue takes the concept of woman as the proverbial "other" to an almost illogical extreme, funneling oceans of uncertainty into a female form and turning these emotions out again into uncomfortable reflections on death, fate, and all of those other nasty things.

"Tides of the Moon" takes a typical image of femininity and transforms it into a meditation on loss and powerlessness ("The threads that run through your life/ Hang from your sleeve/ Wind through your soul/ The kind you can't control/ But wish you could break"), only to come back to the now-unsettling romantic sentiment, "It ties you to me." But even during all this, the band refuses to simply wallow in emotion, instead confronting their connections to pop lyricism smartly.

On "A Drop in Time," Donahue quips, "Her words profane, her mouth divine/ I tried to sympathize with both sides/ But I was caught, like a floating thought/ Stuck inside of Leonard Cohen's mind." As playful as they can occasionally be, though, Donahue's words are always rooted in nagging doubts and creeping riddles like those voiced by his creaky falsetto in "Lincoln's Eyes" ("What is dark like a birthmark/ Pulls like a magnet/ Male and female/ And covets like a dragon?").

The music, of course, is by no means as unstable as the lyrics. Where the band seemed a bit more easygoing and loose in their explorations of the orchestral-pop form on Deserter's Songs, All is Dream takes the band's newfound preoccupations in a definite direction. This makes the music sound a bit overdetermined at times (most notably, the opening track's calculated symphonic swells), but for the most part, their grasp of the sound has improved. The dark, driving rocker "Chains" cuts out at exactly the right moment, and bangs out a few cathartic Beethoven string hits before again steamrolling ahead. A soprano voice that sobs out the soft prelude to "Lincoln's Eyes" returns as a banshee-wail in the song's brink-of-chaos midsection, and the song returns obliquely to this sound in its gorgeous bowed-saws outro. "Little Rhymes" makes the most from its beautiful pedal steel lines, accentuating Donahue's melody without obscuring it.

Of course, Mercury Rev don't need all this fancy instrumentation to get their point across. "Spiders and Flies," a relatively simple piano ballad, stands as the most affecting song on the album. As Mercel caresses the keys, Donahue quietly unravels, confessing fears of death and disconnection from the unnamed female who's been flitting around the edges of the album the whole time. And, with shocking ease, the band shifts from these depths into the exultantly dreamy final track, "Hercules." As the song's percussive glee swells alongside guitarist Grasshopper's transcendently melodic noise solo, it becomes oddly clear that Mercury Rev has, in some way, come to love this uncertainty-- just as the pop protagonist can't stay away from the inscrutable object of his affections, and the pop fan can find a place in its heart for the erratic motions of a band as in love with music as this one.