from the LP Boces, Beggars Banquet Records, 1993“…tonight I’ll dig tunnels to your nightmare room…and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s up, up up up up up up up…” Let me tell ya, when you’re deep in the remote depths of a very purposely induced K-hole, sitting on the floor at the foot of a staircase can really feel like you are staring up at the carpeted existential ladder of time itself, the soiled footprints of Cleveland’s winter sludge marking a path of evolution that would surely take eons to complete---or at least it seems that way when you’re blown on ketamine. I haven’t done K in years, but those holes were some of the farthest out places I have ever visited, zones where all the gravity that quantum physicists speak of existing with such impending force in other dimensions must surely leak into, when the very thought of standing up itself is such a detached and distant premise that it takes near an hour to finish deciding that, no, indeed, you will not be standing up! Mercury Rev never did obtain the same kind of fanatical (or large) fanbase that their philosophical siblings the Flaming Lips did (and have), leaving them to languish in alt-rock obscurity until their re-birth as late ‘90s alt-roots cult heores.
