VENUE ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL, LONDON
DATE 19/03/2025
With the high collar and unrolled cuffs of his white shirt poking through his buttoned black pea coat and sporting a sailor’s cap and red scarf, Jonathan Donahue’s frequent wide-eyed stares make him look like the terrified captain of The Demeter, the cursed ship that brought Dracula from Europe to Whitby. At times, his gently waving arms look as if he’s trying to levitate from the stage to join the fictional vampire; at others he’s exhorting and highlighting the playing of his bandmates, most specifically guitarist and co-founder Sean ‘Grasshopper’ Mackowiak and drummer Joe Magistro on either side of the stage. But most of all, he looks like a man at the centre of a band working in tandem to create music of stunning and often overwhelming beauty.
Mercury Rev have been through many iterations since their inception, and especially since the release of their 1998 breakthrough album, Deserter’s Songs, which does much of the heavy lifting tonight, but this line-up is up there with the best of them. Augmented by keyboard and harmonium player Marion Genser and multi-instrumentalist Jesse Chandler who deftly moves from keyboards to flute to saxophone and back again, the quintet’s command of their skills gently holds the gossamer exquisiteness of Tonite It Shows in their collective hand to sweep its gorgeously extended coda like a chiffon scarf in a warm summer breeze.