The Light in You’s title signals Mercury Rev’s intention: their first album for seven years appears to be about redemption, featuring as it does songs about shedding bad habits (Amelie) and confronting unhappiness (Central Park East). Sometimes the redemption is in the arrangements, such as the swell into the festival-sunset chorus of You’ve Gone With So Little for So Long. The lyrics might be clunky: Autumn in the Air sounds like it’s trying to be one of those beauteous, sad ballads Sinatra would sing in his 60s, but Frank would have thrown away a lyric sheet that asked him to compare the autumn skies to being in “Beatle George’s mind”. The two most apparently throwaway songs might actually be the ones that are most crucial here: Are You Ready? and Rainy Day Record are hymns to the power of pop itself, the former a celebration of dancing to the Rascals and the Pretty Things – “psychedelic rock and blue-eyed soul” – and the latter a reverie about buying an actual record for the first time in years and falling in love all over again. It sounds as if music has rescued Mercury Rev.
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