Mercyland — We Never Lost a Single Game
Qobuz archival release review (Sept. 2022)
The last half of the ’80s was a wild time for American independent rock ’n’ roll. The in-between era that came after R.E.M.’s biggest-cult-band-in-the-country status and before Nirvana completely upended “independent music” was a time filled with robust regional scenes threaded together by a national network of clubs and smaller venues providing touring opportunities for bands to find (slightly) larger followings. This sounds self-evident nowadays, as many of these venues (and the booking agents who put bands into them) have become highly professionalized, profit-skimming fixtures of the modern music industry. But at the time, it felt incredibly exciting and organic, with a familial attitude rooted to a DIY punk ethos that prized authenticity and fun over aspirational commercial appeal. (Five dollar show tickets and nickel beers didn’t hurt either.) Importantly, the sounds of the bands that traveled these circuits were never homogenous, ranging from serious experimental noise and goofy weirdness to gentle acoustic pop and burly rock ’n’ roll, but that never kept folks from using regional similarities to identify scenes. Thus was Mercyland — hailing from Athens, GA — the best Minneapolis band in the South. Dealing in the same sort of punk-rooted melodic rock as the Replacements and Soul Asylum, Mercyland were very much aficionados of the “loud fast rules” school of thought when it came to their music. While the band’s compositional approach was always just a little too smart and surprising to fall into three-chord tropes, they never seemed to forget that the best way to keep a crowd engaged on a Tuesday in a sleepy college town was to pummel them into submission with volume, but also with melodies they could sing on the drive home. And, unlike their Twin Cities spiritual brethren, there was never the thought for the need to be sensitive poets. For showgoers in the South, a Mercyland show was something that was met with high expectations, as their high-energy, high-volume delivery quickly became legendary, so much so that when the band finally released a studio album (1989’s No Feet on the Cowling), it was something of a disappointment because — despite its energetic excellence — the full-bore intensity of their live shows wasn’t quite captured. (Ironic considering that core Mercyland member David Barbe would later become known for his production work, as well as his bass-playing in Sugar.) Incredibly, this collection of material recorded after Cowling for an aborted follow up album (the band would split in 1991) manages to give a real sense of the band. While none of the three players in Mercyland were virtuosic, they very much conformed to the high ideals of a power trio, and here they are sharply focused on delivering the goods. The nine songs blaze by in just a half-hour, but are dynamically rich and unrelenting in their strength, easily capturing both a band that would implode in its prime and an era that was about to completely unravel.
