Minor miracles: Mercury Rev live in London

Their original lead singer, as engagingly recounted tonight by current frontman Jonathan Donahue, had a habit of throwing his mic to the floor mid-song as he made a beeline to the nearest bar. The band came close to implosion several times as years of narcotics and commercial indifference took their toll, and it was only the unexpected success of 1998’s Deserter’s Songs that saved them from oblivion.

It’s been seven long years since their previous album, with Donahue losing almost everything he owned in Hurricane Irene in the meantime and, all things considered, it’s somewhat of a pleasant surprise to see the band still doing their whimsical thing (albeit in stripped down form) a whole quarter-century since they first got together.

It must be said that they do straddle a very thin line between blissful majesty and intolerable tweeness at times. Set opener at London's Oval Space tonight (24th November) “The Queen of Swans”, for instance, is so earnestly saccharine it makes the Polyphonic Spree sound like Burzum. But on the whole Mercury Rev get away with it, and a large part of that is due to the sheer exuberance of Donahue, who flits around stage with child-like glee and the air of a man who genuinely, passionately still loves what he’s doing. In many ways it makes perfect sense he’s a former member of the Flaming Lips – one can perceive more than a few parallels between the two acts (indeed, Deserter’s Songs and The Soft Bulletin were both recorded at the same time at the same studio) - but whilst the ‘Flips have spent recent years pouring all their energy into spectacle and procuring enough LSD to fuel Wayne Coyne’s interminable monologues, there’s a distinct lack of pretension or agenda with Donahue. The fact that “Holes”, despite containing on an objective level one of the most painful rhyming couplets in the history of popular music, is such a triumphant, singalong joy is almost entirely thanks to his infectious, uncomplicated enthusiasm - not to respond to such energy in kind would be like kicking a puppy.

Mercury Rev are a band that demand an expensive, full-on sound, and tonight generally does their aesthetic justice, but there moments where the sheer barrage of bass and percussion simply doesn’t suit. Their rockier, more downbeat moments, such as “The Funny Bird”, sound fantastic, but “Endlessly”, a song that on record lacks drums entirely, loses all elements of subtlety and much of its charm with it. More varied dynamics, and a greater awareness of where a lightness of touch would work better than full-on bombast would have made this show a classic, rather than a simply great one (although in fairness, the unexpected rock-out at the end of “Opus 40” was an awesome touch). But then again, it seems almost churlish to complain, given it’s a minor miracle we’re watching them in 2015 in the first place.