Emerging from upstate New York in the early 1990s with the blast of overflowingly inspired tuneful weirdness that is Yerself Is Steam, Mercury Rev has since released three more full-lengths of original material - including the new Deserter's Songs (V2) - plus a handful of b-sides, remixes, Peel Sessions, and oddities, collected in the U.K.-only release Leggo My Ego. Original singer David Baker left after two albums to pursue his visions, musical and otherwise, and released an album under the name Shady (sadly without follow-up) which featured guest appearances by psych-noise all-stars including Adam Franklin from Swervedriver, Martin Carr from the Boo Radleys, Jimi Shields from Rollerskate Skinny and Lotus Crown, Bill Whitten from St. Johnny and Grand Mal, and Sooyoung Park from Seam. Mercury Rev's third album, See You on the Other Side, introduced a gentler, more introspective sound, heavily influenced by the dense melodicism and dappled orchestrations of the Beach Boys circa Pet Sounds.

Deserter's Songs is even less overtly rock-influenced. Strings, horns, keyboards, even bowed saw create a riotous sensory overload that translates the earlier Rev aesthetic into a different tonal language. It's full of lush, oversaturated orchestrations, a luxurious pillow of sound just this side of excess. The combination of a quirky aesthetic with an orchestral sound nearly cornball at times calls to mind Van Dyke Parks, although guitarist Grasshopper, whom I spoke with over a staticky cell phone during the band's current tour, isn't terribly familiar with Parks's work.

"I never really heard things like [Parks's classic] Song Cycle, but we know some of the Beach Boys stuff [that Parks worked on]. We were fans of a lot of the music those guys probably were listening to: old big band music, show tunes, [music from] the whole history of American and European music. Originally, all that music is what made up rock and roll in the first place. It was a combination of African and European sorts of sounds - bluegrass, blues, jazz, show tunes, and all that."

That eclectic approach to sound - bringing creative new arrangements to sounds rooted in a broad spectrum of music - perhaps explains why the group invited Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, late of The Band, to play on the new album. Although the two groups don't sound much alike, their approach to musical sources seems compatible - and indeed, when Helm's drums enter on "Opus 40," his familiar laconic, unfussy, but subtly placed accents mesh perfectly with Mercury Rev's shimmering, misty strings and keyboard backdrop.

According to Grasshopper, Hudson's and Helm's presence on the CD is a fortunate accident. "We live up on the Hudson River in the Catskills, and they live in Woodstock, which is real close by, so we'd see them walking around town, getting haircuts and the like. I just saw Rick Danko buying a bunch of meat from the butcher shop. So we see them around, but we were always sort of intimidated. We knew some people that they knew, so we gave them a few of our albums and some of the stuff we were working on, and they were into it. So we asked them if they'd play, and they agreed. Like a dream come true, really."

As for the thick but well-coiffed mane of sound distinguishing Deserter's Songs, Grasshopper agrees that the band has always espoused a "more is more" aesthetic. "We've always tried to do a sort of big, larger-than-life kind of sound, but with this record, we're gaining confidence in what we're doing. We'd gone through periods where we'd just say 'put everything on' - everything would play a melody and fight for it. Sometimes there's a whole bunch of melodies going on at once. Now we're a little more confident in saying, 'that part doesn't need to be there,' and what's left just breathes a little more. This record is also a lot different in that we've learned a lot of production and miking and stuff. That got to be pretty easy with guitars and that, but when we started using saws and all the violins, it gets a lot tougher to get it on tape and have everything in its space. That took a while - it was a lot of trial and error, and sometimes it didn't work. We had to throw out a bunch of stuff, some instrumentals we tried." Some of the material may see release as future b-sides, and Grasshopper hopes to see a Leggo My Ego Vol. 2 including some of this material as well as other unreleased projects recorded since the release of the first volume.

Likely to see sooner release, though, are some remixes of tracks from Deserter's Songs. "The Chemical Brothers did a few different remixes of 'Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp' - they came out pretty cool. They used little bits and pieces of the regular song, then added and looped a whole bunch of other stuff. One was really way out, pretty cool; another was closer to the original. And Bill Laswell did some work with 'Holes' - he had a sarengi player on it and arranged the whole thing differently - very interesting." These mixes should see light sometime between Thanksgiving and early next year, according to the folks at V2 Records, the band's new label. And as we spoke, Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade of Fort Apache Studios were working on a remix of "Opus 40" for later release.

That label change was an impetus for the Harmony Rockets project, which allowed Rev members to explore a less song-based format than Mercury Rev usually works in. "That was a different thing that me and Jonathan [Donahue, Rev vocalist and instrumentalist] did, and there's a few other different people playing that [who aren't in] Mercury Rev. It was sort of an improvisatory thing where we'd play live - there were certain things set, but mostly improvising. That had a lot to do with how we communicate, in a lot of images and colors, like 'that song needs more yellow.' And Jonathan, the way he speaks and [writes] lyrics, [he uses] a lot of very vivid images, like 'holes, dug by little moles, angry jealous spies got telephones for eyes'" (from "Holes").

The second Harmony Rockets recording featured versions of songs and incidental music from a variety of films, including Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and L'Apocalypse des Animaux. In fact, Mercury Rev began by writing soundtracks for student and independent films. Grasshopper was a film student at the University of Buffalo, and he says that using sound to paint mood and image is still a big part of what Mercury Rev and its side projects do. The bandmembers' film school days also influence their unusual decision to record on 35mm film rather than conventional tape. "That's the old film stock they used to use, back in the '40s before there was two-inch tape. In Fredonia, where we used to work with Dave Fridmann, they had one of those machines, and they were switching to digital stuff and pretty much gave us the machine back when we were starting Yerself Is Steam. Then we found a place in Hollywood to get the tapes. It's got larger heads, so it's got a warmer sound."

While Mercury Rev generally beats its own path, it has succumbed to one current music industry trend: the new CD features a hidden, untitled bonus track. This one features another side of Mercury Rev - it showcases both their antic sense of humor and some out-of-the-way musical influences. My first impression of the track was that it was an homage of sorts to Frank Zappa's Synclavier programming on albums like Jazz from Hell, but Grasshopper claims again that the influence lies further upstream. "We've been listening to a lot of Harry Partch, different classical stuff, like [contemporary Russian composer Sofia] Gubaidulina, [Polish composer Henryk] Górecki, stuff like that." Given the band's visual orientation, I also thought of another composer: Carl Stalling, who wrote most of the music for the classic Warner Bros. cartoons from the thirties through the sixties. Grasshopper concurs:

"It has kind of a Bugs Bunny vibe to it."