Taking Sides: Flaming Lips vs. Mercury Rev

See You On The Other Side has always been my favorite. I feel like it always gets lost between Boces and Deserter's Songs. But maybe with the exception of "Young Man's Stride" which is sequenced way too early, it might be their best effort. It still has the bite of their earlier stuff, but you can still feel that spacey trippyness of their later stuff before it descended into neo-hippie blandness.

I saw them live post-All Is Dream and it was, quite frankly, one of the best shows I've ever seen.

SYOTOS is def the peak

tbh I'm not sure All Is Dream really holds up (though an improvement over DS imo) but Tides Of The Moon and Lincoln's Eyes still bring it maybe

like, A Drop In Time starts and you want to kick the man downstairs

Yeah, the saccharie disney-isms of All is Dream were when it started to go awry a bit - Secret Migration was even more dire, with the exception of "In a Funny Way" (which was also on "Laurel Canyon" soundtrack).

The hip-hop grooves are part of what makes the Flaming Lips' space rock interesting to me (they're currently touring with Clipping). I'm not as familiar with Mercury Rev but none of what I've heard has that flavour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPMpoAZa3tI

maaaan

Night and Fog is a great tune, one of their best. All is Dream as a whole is merely ok though. The Secret Migration is dull except for In a Funny Way, Across Your Ocean and First Time Mother's Joy (I love the harmonies on the latter.) I haven't listened to anything since, due to the sense of an irreversible decline into increasing blandness.

I thought Deserters Songs was amazing at the time, but I'm not sure about it now. If I were to be a DS vs The Soft Bulletin, I think the songwriting on the latter is stronger, and has caused it to hold up better. Yoshimi has a lot of good stuff too, but At War with the Mystics seemed to be all texture and nothing else. I never listened to the later supposed return to form. As for the Rev, I think Boces and SYOTOS are probably the most enduring for the mix of inventiveness and tunes (Yerself is Steam is perhaps just a little *too* self-indulgent.)

mercury rev duh?

Rocking out to "delta bottleneck" as the last song at a house party in '98 or 99 felt pretty cool

I may be the only person in the universe who thought Snowflake Midnight was excellent. Album from 2015 much less so.

Count me among the "All is Dream is underrated" crowd, and, like yesca, I was always shocked by the fact that the record fared so poorly (relative to the previous album, of course). Perhaps part of it could be blamed on the overly-ambitious Disney-isms, part of it was that maybe they followed up a critically acclaimed album too soon, part of it could be that people were just getting over that particular sound by that point, I dunno. I think individual songs on All is Dream are great but its one of those weird albums that doesn't work as whole, somehow. Maybe it's a sequencing issue?

I know this: if they'd pulled a Neutral Milk Hotel and stopped making records after Deserter's Songs, there would be multiple Mercury Rev threads revived every time there was so much as a a rumor of new Mercury Rev music, and people would be talking about them in the same hushed, reverent whispers they do MBV, Boards of Canada, and, err, Neutral Milk Hotel.

"All is Dream" also came out in the states on 9/11, which may have overshadowed its release

I don't mean that in a bad way, just that it was a hectic time..