The Light In You—Mercury Rev’s 10th full-length and first in seven years—picks up where 2008’s Snowflake Midnight left off, with stalwart founders Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper drawing inspiration from nature and the Rubik’s Cube of love in equal measure. There is a strong autumnal vibe about the affair—a modern Days Of Future Passed, complete with sweeping orchestral touches and wistful remembrances by the fistful. When the band’s “psychedelic rock and blue-eyed soul” finds its groove, it’s still a breathless wonder to behold. Mercury Rev will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read out MAGNET Classics feature on the band’s Yerself Is Steam.
Grasshopper and Donahue: Alejandro Jodorowsky is a film-maker, a shaman, a poet, a comic-book writer, a mystic, etc. He also dabbles in the mythology of the Tarot and his hallucinogenic surreal film The Holy Mountain continues to be a great influence on Mercury Rev. In Jodorowsky’s book Psychomagic, he says that healing through the use of Psychomagic “consists in giving advice to solve problems by applying, in a non- superstitious way, the techniques of magic. The elements on which it relies are all classes of symbolic acts that can be proposed to a person.” In a way, it is Jung’s collective unconscious melded with the mysteries of the 22 kabbalistic paths of the Tarot. Do things in life happen by chance or does the creator have a master plan? Joderowsky uses the Tarot as a “projective test” to understand more about people’s unconscious history and where the subject’s specific problems may lie, thereby awakening the “light” in everyone (the light in you)! Through the use of his system of Psychomagic, one can help find their deeper self in a world where all is illusion, where all is dream. As in all of Jodorowsky’s work, we find Psychomagic to be a guide book for helping to awaken the inner light in order to avoid “sleep-walking” thru life.
Video after the jump.
