Mercury Rev Summons A World of Mystery and Enchantment in Buffalo
4/25/2025 performance at The Town Ballroom revels in transformative sound
Enchantment.
When was the last time you felt it? The last time you welcomed it? The last time you fell beneath its sway, with the wide eyes and open heart of a child?
I’ve been chasing enchantment since I was just a kid. There have been many avenues toward it over the years, but none more direct and obstruction-free than music. And no band has taken me there more consistently than Mercury Rev.
In a 2018 piece, I opined that “Mercury Rev makes music that sounds like it has always existed, as if it was plucked from the silver-blue ether fully formed, a perfect, reverb-laden kaleidoscope of transformative sound,” and I feel the same today - perhaps even more so following the band’s wholly transcendent appearance at the Town Ballroom in downtown Buffalo last Friday.
In my view, no other band has done so much to bring a progressive take on expansive art-rock traditions into the early 21st century zeitgeist. The Town Ballroom gig underscored this belief, while simultaneously making it plain that the passage of time has done nothing to diminish Mercury Rev’s ability to summon magic and weave a spell with it.
The impending arrival of that spell came as the lights went down and a taped introduction melded a Ravi Shankar mantra to a spoken recital from chapter 17 of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince (“"But you are innocent and true, and you come from a star . . .”), and then the band arrived on the Town Ballroom stage like a massive wave breaking on a beachhead, a sublime sonic onslaught taking the form of “The Funny Bird,” one of several songs from the era-defining 1998 masterwork Deserter’s Songs that would appear in the evening’s setlist.
Immediately, the pure power of the 2025 edition of the band - co-founders singer/guitarist Jonathan Donahue and guitarist Sean ‘Grasshopper’ Mackowiak, alongside newer recruits Joe Migistro on drums, Jesse Chandler on keyboards, key-bass, flute and saxophone, and Marion Genser on keyboards - was in full evidence.
Donahue is an extraordinary frontman, whose job entails opening a window and summoning us all into this magical realm where Grashopper’s at turns subtle, evocative, dynamic and brutally bombastic guitar playing ricochets around the ensemble’s gorgeously cacophonous din to create something dizzying, dazzling and deeply beautiful. Donahue uses his body as a conduit for this glorious sound, waving his arms as if extracting some powerful force from the earth, and then throwing that energy toward his bandmates.
Three songs in, a beautifully restructured “Vermillion” spreads its wings, proud of its status as the sole song to be culled from the 2005 masterpiece The Secret Migration. Suitably, the elegy-like song serves as a taking-off point for an engaging space-rock exploration, and at this point, it’s clear that all the elements - the pristine and masterfully mixed sound, the smaller-than-expected, whittled-down-to-diehards-only crowd, the crisp but dream-like wave of sound summoned and controlled but he musicians - were conspiring on this evening to take us somewhere other than where we’d been when we entered the Town Ballroom. Somewhere better, dare I say.
Last year’s spoken-word-centric Born Horses album was represented by Ancient Love, which bloomed fully and impressively in this live setting, a psychedelicized blend of Beat-informed poetry and lush soundscapes serving it well.
A pair of tracks from another of the band’s seminal albums, 2008’s Snowflake Midnight, blended the pastoral and the other-worldly in soul-stirring fashion, particularly when Donahue grabbed his MIDI trumpet during “Runaway Raindrop” and joined the band on a wild excursion through the blurry extremities of inner space. It’s a times like these when we’re made aware that no other band of its generation can so seemingly effortlessly inhabit such a sonic environment.
It was hard not to be moved when original drummer Jimy Chambers joined the band on electric rhythm guitar for a deeply emotive take on the evergreen space ballad “Holes,” offering Buffalo audiences their first experience of Chambers on stage with the band in decades.
And the closing pairing of “Opus 40” and “The Dark is Rising” proved a soothing denouement to the evening’s heady journey, as gorgeous melodies collided with dramatic crescendoes, and we were safely deposited back on earth, better for our shared journey.
I’ve been trying to hold on to this enchanted feeling ever since. I hope I can make it last until next time…
Mercury Rev
The Town Ballroom, Buffalo, NY
4/25/2025
Introduction: Ravi Shankar Shanti, The Little Prince chapter 17
The Funny Bird
Tonite It Shows
Vermillion
Dream of a Young Girl as a Flower/Patterns
Runaway Raindrop
Ancient Love
Tides of the Moon
Holes
Opus 40
The Dark Is Rising