Pitchfork

In a 2001 interview, Jonathan Donahue summarized the difference between Mercury Rev's past and present: "Even on the earlier records that people hear as chaotic and noisy, we were simply orchestrating, but we chose to do it with 10 guitars and feedback, instead of string quartets." If only it were that simple. Though "Chasing a Bee" remains a setlist staple, the well-oiled, workmanlike Mercury Rev that routinely tours the European festival circuit these days bears scant resemblance to the six Buffalo film-school misfits that jolted an unsuspecting underground with 1991's Yerself Is Steam.

For a band that's weathered its share of Pink Floyd comparisons over the years, the parallels between the two bands' histories are uncanny: After two albums of turbulent but bracingly innovative modern psychedelia, Mercury Rev turfed freakish frontman David Baker (their wildcard Syd Barrett character) and put the reins in the hands of Donahue (the steely Roger Waters-like musical director), with guitarist Sean "Grasshopper" Mackowiak playing the dutiful David Gilmour foil.

Like the Flaming Lips, that other band Donahue played with from 1990-92, Mercury Rev would go on to define pre-millennial cosmic American music-- songs the size of canyons filled in with Neil Young-fragile vocal trembles, heavily treated string-section effects, and vulnerable lyrics contrasting starry-eyed wonder with cold hard truth. No surprise that the Rev and the Lips were occupying the same headspace, given that their respective breakthrough albums (1998's Deserter's Songs and 1999's The Soft Bulletin) were both recorded at Tarbox Studios in upstate New York under the production aegis of Mercury Rev bassist Dave Fridmann.

But where the Lips arrived at their creative pinnacle through a series of complex boom-box/parking-lot experiments, Mercury Rev got to theirs through a process of refinement and focus, one that continued through the more conventionally structured All Is Dream (2001) and The Secret Migration (2005). Rather than chart this chronology, the 2xCD best-of/rarities compilation Stillness Breathes deploys a randomized tracklist to reinforce the connections between Mercury Rev's early and current incarnations. Beyond an ongoing fascination with New York State history and mythology (the Coney Island Cyclone, the Catskill Mountains), what unifies the band's work is an undefined temporality-- Mercury Rev songs sound like 1942 and 1967 and 1991 and 2026, often all at once.

While the epochal "Chasing a Bee" may have lured in the UK shoegazer contingent-- at the 3:07 point, the song introduces the most startling, cardiac-arresting guitar squall laid to tape in 1991, Loveless be damned-- its most remarkable features are the choir-like chorus of "la la la's" and calming flute refrain that bravely withstand the punishing onslaught of distortion. And to belie the notion that Mercury Rev lost their capacity for chaos following Baker's departure, there's "Empire State (Son House in Excelsis)" from 1995's See You on the Other Side, the album that effectively mediates between Mercury Rev's early and later output. With its piano-tapped Brian Wilson melody and regal flute line slowly intensifying into a ferocious brass-blasted Sonic Youth-ish eruption, this staggering seven-minute epic represents Mercury Rev in Excelsis.

The other early 90s selections nicely complement the band's later material: The sentimentality of Secret Migration tracks like "Diamonds" and "In a Funny Way" are hardly surprising in light of the charming 1992 single "Car Wash Hair" or 1995's "Everlasting Arm", the band's first foray into avant-schmaltz. Even Baker's swirling "Something for Joey" anticipates the orchestral pop gushes of "Opus 40" and "A Drop in Time". But the second disc's wild assortment of ephemera makes it difficult to discern any kind of logical through-line; think of it as the equivalent of a behind-the-scenes feature on a DVD, cataloguing the various inspirations and research that go into the finished product.

The bonus disc's dearth of quality leftover originals suggests that Mercury Rev enter the studio with their album tracklists already finalized; the outtakes included here are either inconsequential (All Is Dream-era B-side "Observatory Crest") or amusing time capsules ("Clamor", a document of the band's late-80s origins as a Mission of Burma by way of Cocteau Twins post-punk band called Shady Crady). Instead, the disc mostly focuses on Mercury Rev's experiments with other people's material, some of which amount to mere classic-rock karaoke (the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds", John Lennon's "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier"), but several of which explore the Rev's interests beyond the standard rock canon, including showtunes ("I Only Have Eyes for You"), folk standards (Johnny Cash's "Streets of Laredo"), and surrealist beat-poetry soundtracks ("So There" and "Deadman", recited by Robert Creeley and Suicide's Alan Vega, respectively).

Individually, many of these outtakes challenge this collection's "Essential" tag (particularly a woeful trip-hop take on James Brown's "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World", on which guest vocalist Carmen Quinones lays on the soul-diva ad libbing), but taken as a whole, they provide an impressive overview of a band that isn't afraid to journey through the past to find a new way forward. As Baker sang on "Chasing a Bee": "What once was lost, will never be found/ Keep spinning in circles until you break new ground." So even if Mercury Rev's recent albums reflect a certain stasis and contentment, their music always carries with it the possibility that we'll soon see them on the other side.