Taking Sides: Flaming Lips vs. Mercury Rev

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..