Boces: Mercury Rev's noise years, with songs inside them

Boces is the record where Mercury Rev's early noise finally had songs inside it, and the last one with David Baker singing. He was asked to leave when the tour for it ended. The remaster by Henry Rudkins at AIR Studios is out on 13 November via Beggars Banquet.

Mercury Rev formed in Buffalo, New York, in 1989, students at the University at Buffalo drawn to the drone music of composer Tony Conrad. Baker sang and played keyboards, Jonathan Donahue and Sean Mackowiak, known as Grasshopper, played guitar, Suzanne Thorpe played flute, Dave Fridmann played bass and ran the desk, and Jimy Chambers drummed. They started out scoring their own student films, and the 1991 debut Yerself Is Steam kept that looseness. Donahue had also been playing guitar in the Flaming Lips, on In a Priest Driven Ambulance, and left that band in the middle of 1991.

Boces came two years later, their second album and their first for a major label, Columbia in the US and Beggars in the UK. Fridmann recorded it. The title is lifted from the BOCES system of vocational schools in New York State. Baker was asked out once the supporting tour finished, and on that tour, at Lollapalooza, the band were pulled off stage for playing too loud. What came next was a different group. By Deserter's Songs in 1998 and All Is Dream in 2001 the sound had changed too, with jazz, funk, doo-wop, techno and folk folded in. Their tenth album, Born Horses, arrived in 2024 through Bella Union.

Ten songs run across two sides headed Push Me and Pull Me, and the record lives on the tension between its dreaming stretches and its thrashy freakouts. What lifts it above a hundred other noise records of the period is everything in the middle of the racket: flute and harp, brass, a choir, recorded by Fridmann so the pretty parts and the ugly parts share a room rather than take turns. That is also where the jazz-pop tag comes from. Nothing here is thrown away, including the instruments most bands would have used as decoration.

'Meth of a Rockette's Kick' opens with 10:29 on the clock and spends all of it, which tells you nobody involved was thinking about singles. 'Trickle Down,' 'Boys Peel Out' and 'Bronx Cheer' follow in shrinking order, three shorter songs with the noise left switched on, and the closest this band came to writing pop before they actually did. 'Downs Are Feminine Balloons' takes the side out at length again. Side two opens on 'Something For Joey,' hands the long slot to 'Snorry Mouth,' and closes with 'Hi-Speed Boats' and 'Girlfren,' with 'Continuous Drunks and Blunders' dropped in between.

If you arrived at Mercury Rev through Deserter's Songs or All Is Dream, this is the country next door: same band, fewer manners, more flute. Come in through the Flaming Lips' noisy years, or through Tony Conrad's drones, and Boces is the bridge between them. Play it after you already love them. It explains why the calm records sound like relief.

What does not hold is the sprawl. 'Snorry Mouth' carries the second long stretch and does less with it, an argument repeated rather than extended, and by the back of the record that patience feels like a request rather than a reward. 'Continuous Drunks and Blunders' is over before it becomes anything, and on a record this full of instruments, the fragment is the one passage that earns nothing.

Three decades on, Boces is a 4.0: the strongest case the noise years have, docked for the minutes it will not cut. The remaster puts it back out with the band on a European tour marking 25 years of All Is Dream, and at Hackney Church in London on 17 October. Listen to the later records first if you must. Then come back to the one where they were still allowed to scare people.

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