I’m not sure where my sudden interest in fairy tales had came from, I don’t think it had much to do with reading Joseph Campbell, but I could be wrong.  Just before that chance encounter with the Brothers Grimm, I’d imagined a story centered wholly around snowflakes  and a young girl’s struggle to reconcile with her brother’s death.  Snowflakes seemed an apt metaphor for so many grand questions about the universe and the great beyond, but that’s really all I knew about the story.  As writing commenced, it began to take the shape of a fairy tale all on its own.  Sadly, it also took many different routes to incompleteness. 

It wasn’t a completely useless experience.  I learned my strengths and limitations as a writer and at some point I also discovered that I in fact really like fairy tales, Bjork’s Vespertine, and Mercury Rev’s The Secret Migration, all three devices I had been using to write my story without even realizing it.

Fresh off their All is Dream tour, Mecury Rev retired to their very own studio in the Catskill Mountains to begin work on a follow-up in 2002.  The result was 2005’s The Secret Migration, a phantasmagorical album with an impressive IMAX sensibility and distinct fairy tale flavor, if lacking the overt experimentation of previous outings.  Based loosely on the transformational movement from autumn to spring, the album stuffs its pages with white horses, dark forests, climbing roses, and radiant goddesses.  It’s a parallel winter universe that’s fun to escape to, offsetting and accenting the ever-shortening days.

While it lacks the organic beauty of Desserter’s Songs and All is Dream, The Secret Migration’s electronic approach does lend a more malleable atmosphere to the songs here.  A wealth of soaring minutiae pop and fade in the mid-ground, creating a densely magical backdrop for Jonathan Donahue's fantastical dramas.  

Even if the lyrics are less mysterious than on previous outings, the album features some of band’s most elegant melodies.  The “Climbing Rose” is a gorgeous hymnal that finds Donahue praying “lift me up” to a lover, and “Vermillion,” one of their best songs to date, is a document of intense longing and regret that sees him employing autumnal imagery and a tense melody; it's also the closest Mercury Rev's come to making a straight-ahead rock song in recent memory.  Similarly, “Arise” chugs along on a wave of rumbling toms and spiraling guitar work from Sean Mackowiak (a.k.a. “Grasshopper”). 

The album ends on a reverent note with two songs about birth and motherhood, completing the song cycle’s movement to spring.  “First-Time Mother's Joy (Flying)” is a vintage McCartneyesque piano balad, and “Down Poured the Heavens” is an eerie coda reminiscent of their work on All is Dream.

The fact that these are their most conventional-sounding songs lessens their initial impact, but like most dodgy albums I try to rescue, The Secret Migration is as rewarding as you allow it to be.  The illustrated storybook aesthetic of songs like “Black Forest (Lorelei)” and “Diamonds” may come off as overly precious, but I'm tellin' ya, these songs go down real easy with a cup of earl grey and snowflakes cascading outside the window.