This fall, Mercury Rev will embark on a brief tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Deserter’s Songs. It’ll kick off at the previously-announced Desert Daze 2018, where they’ll play the album in its entirety. Then they’ll stop in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Brooklyn following that for shows celebrating the anniversary of the album. Here’s a statement from the band’s Jonathan Donahue on the shows:

By the time we began to surface following the destruction of the mid 90’s there was no longer anyone of the band ‘in the band’. It felt as though Grasshopper and I were just these two see-through phantoms banging around at night in my attic, bumping into a melody here and there, strumming on the last of my guitars not in hock, pressing pray and record on the old 8 Track reel to reel. We had no management, no label, no money and to be completely honest, no one clamoring for a new Rev album anywhere in the world. In fact, on the 2″ tapes during the late recordings Dave Fridmann didn’t write Mercury Rev and instead he used the name Harmony Rockets, a recent experimental side project of ours. The way we saw it, Deserter’s wasn’t going to be our next album… it was going to be our last. And likely only released on cassette to our friends… In fact, the only copy i’ve kept of Deserter’s Songs from that time is on cassette. If anything, these upcoming live shows are by far the closest in spirit and nature to the original writing of that time. Near silent, apprehensive, fragile to the point of ‘touch it and it turns to dust’. So full of self-doubt. The melancholy many hear on the album went in to album from the start, maybe long before it. Like from a mother to her unborn child, sadness and bewilderment just poured out us and into the album like an open cup.

Here are the dates:

10/12-14 Lake Perris, CA @ Desert Daze
10/16 San Francisco, CA @ The Chapel
10/18 Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
10/19 Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern
10/26 Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall Of Williamsburg