Upper Wilds: Mercury keeps the planet record short and hot

Mercury is a guitar record with no room in it. Ten tracks, thirty-nine minutes, out August 28 on Thrill Jockey, and Dan Friel has rarely sounded this sure of a running order. The astronomy is still the frame: heat in the first half, endings in the second, and no time spent explaining either.

Friel came out of Parts & Labor, the noise band he formed in 2002 and wound up in 2012, who have since had a surprise resurgence of their own. In the gap he made two solo records, in 2013 and 2015, leaning electronic, and missed the guitar and the company enough to start again. In 2016 he wrote a few riffs, called bassist Zach Lehrhoff, formerly of Ex Models, and drummer Aaron Siegel, and took the name from a brainstorm with his wife. The 2017 debut was Friel on every instrument. Mars followed in 2018 with guests including Katie Eastburn and Mark Shue, and Venus in 2021 titled its ten songs 'Love Song #1' through 'Love Song #10', a chart joke that worked as a constraint. Jupiter arrived in 2023 with a Hüsker Dü cover, a Midwest run with Pelican and, a year later, a tour with Psychic Graveyard. Mercury follows it with Jason Binnick on bass and Jeff Ottenbacher on drums, both aboard since the Mars years.

Guitar is the whole record. That has been the setup since Friel started the band, and here it leaves no slack: the playing is loud, the arrangements are short, and songs end where a looser band would start a third section. The rhythm section holds a line and lets the guitar argue over it, an old noise rock bargain that still pays when nobody stalls.

The order does the arguing. 'Mercury' opens, 'Fever' follows, and 'Burning Bright' and 'Hellfire' turn up later, so the heat arrives in bursts instead of one long block. The bookends are the two longest tracks, the only concession to scale on the record. Everything between them is built to land and get out, and thirty-nine minutes feels like the right number for it.

'Death Song #3' is the record's only numbered song, a nod to the 'Love Song' run on Venus with the romance taken out, and it promises a series the album never delivers, which nags more than it should. 'Reaper' sits in the middle of the back half. 'Green-Wood Cemetery' and 'Timekeeper' are the two titles that do not look at the sky, one putting you in the ground and the other in the clock. 'Dying Star' closes the record, longest and last, the most obvious image in the band's vocabulary, saved for the end and spent properly rather than reached for.

Mercury is for people who already own Jupiter and Venus, and for anyone who wants a guitar record that treats a short song as a complete thought. The nearest thing in the catalog is Parts & Labor's volume with the hook left intact, which this band has been circling since the Hüsker Dü cover, and Mercury gets closest to landing it. It is not for listeners who want sprawl: Parts & Labor's double disc ran long and proggy in places, and nothing here does.

The flaw is in the middle. 'Hellfire' restates ground that 'Burning Bright' has already covered, and the second half announces its ending three separate times, with 'Reaper' and 'Dying Star' pointing at the same door. One of those is surplus, and it is 'Hellfire'. A record this tight cannot carry a track that only repeats a point.

That does not sink it. A 4: the concept has been the engine since Mars, and this is the record where it stops needing to announce itself. Nothing on Mercury is leftover, and the band plays like they know there is no more room.

The tracklist

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