Check out that album cover. That pretty much sums up how The Quality of Mercury‘s new album, The Voyager, is going to sound.
Jeremiah Rouse, otherwise known as The Quality of Mercury, has come back from a nine-year journey to release his new record, and my guess is that was how long he was cruising around in that spaceship on the album’s cover because The Voyager is full of cosmic riffs and epic sounds that seem to drift around distant planets or alongside speeding comets.
“Moonrise” starts off the journey with Rouse proclaiming, “Sleeping giant rise. It’s time to breathe the stars.” The sleeping giant could be us, the moon, the Earth, a celestial being, or just the sound of the entire album. “Radiate” blasts you with Hum-like intensity and an intense tale of an astronaut fleeing a burning, crumbling ship in one last ditch effort to leap from his craft to a space station and hope his oxygen doesn’t run out before he can reach it. “Ganymede” is a story of how the future, or even distant moons, aren’t far enough to escape heartbreak (“Thirteen was the number of the airlock where you left me…Now I’m broken and still frozen on this ice moon where you left me.”).
“Heaven’s Gate” is indeed about the doomed cult of the same name, but not about its ideals. It’s about how those people wanted to find something in the stars that they were missing on Earth…even though it was around them the entire time. The thick bass line Rouse plays on it is a good touch. “Desperate Measures” has two lovers on opposite sides of space taking great risks to reunite. This theme of longing for connection is prevalent on the whole record, and Rouse has said how “…relationships, both human and spiritual, are at the center of everything.”
“Receiving Hertz” has Rouse (Who, by the way, plays everything on this record.) singing about wishing for a human connection across vast distances as he gets “signals from a distant light. Receiving hertz, but still out of sight.” Rouse’s guitar work on “Selenite” has so many layers to it that it feels like he’s terraforming a landscape with it. The title track, which ends the album, has Rouse leaving on his journey into the stars to search “…for purpose and meaning, but the space goes on and on. Tranquil horizons deceiving.” He thinks he’ll be alone, and he might be right, but he also knows he has to make the launch.
We all do at some point, be it into adulthood, parenthood, a new job, a new relationship, a move across the country or the cosmos. We’re all seeking connection here on Earth and even across our galaxy. It’s the eternal quest, and The Quality of Mercury invites us to take it.
Keep your mind open.
[Be sure to subscribe before you go.]
[Thanks to Shauna at Shamless Promotion PR!]