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Posted inSpin Cycle

Introducing Spin Cycle, the Mercury’s New Album Review Column

Three albums to lock in with every two weeks: local, international, whatever we want! 

Welcome to Spin Cycle! Itโ€™s the biweekly aural hygiene you deserve in a handy-dandy cheat sheet format for albums of particular note from Portland and beyond! The Rose City is not unlike a homing beacon for discerning audiophiles, semi-professional appreciators of physical media, and folks who spend three-quarters of their waking lives with headphones fastened […]

Posted inMusic

Building Community with Portugal. The Man

Frontman John Gourley talks about the band’s new album Shish, the importance of community, and hardcore music.

John Gourley of Portland-based Portugal. The Man has been quietly dropping heat since the mid-2000s, well before the formation of P.TM and the bandโ€™s move from Wasilla, Alaska, down to Rip City. Itโ€™s been all community building of some sort or another: community building with other musicians and creatives, community building between cultures and traditions, […]

Posted inAlbum Review

Album Review: Puritan Themes, the Second Psych Masterpiece by Holy Sons in 2025

A cosmic road trip shifting between physical and interior worlds.

According to the Puritan Themes press release, the albumโ€™s lead single โ€œChain Gang,โ€ is โ€œan imaginary take on if Cat Stevens had smoked a ton of salvia and taken a much darker route within the world of dense, story-telling songwriting.โ€ย  Experiences with salvia can be impactful. Fun trips where textures replicate themselves across various surfaces, […]

Posted inAlbum Review

Album Review: We’re Heading to the Lake With Portland’s Guitar

From bedroom beatmaking to touring the US with a band that has bad SEO and good sound. 

In an age where search engine optimization is a vital consideration for news headlines, business upstarts, and pretty much all creative endeavors, youโ€™d be forgiven if you thought that a band called Guitar would drift into eternal, unsearchable obscurity. But ask Guitar brainchild Saia Kuli about the would-be gaffe, itโ€™s the innate humor in such […]

Posted inAlbum Review

Album Review: The Pastoral Minimalism of Ann Annieโ€™s El Prado

Real and imagined landscapes for where you are and where you’ve come from.

Joan Mitchell made a name for herself in the art world through her large scale paintings featuring gestural, emotionally charged mark making. Working mainly as an abstract-expressionist, her paintings vibrate in her use of color and the movement of brushstrokes across the canvas. Though her paintings appear to be non-objective, as one spends time with […]

Posted inAlbum Review

Album Review: The Sophisticated Sleaze of Menos el Oso Turns 20

Minus the Bear’s opus gets the deluxe treatment, heralding massive US tour

In the mid-2000s, Seattle was exploding with bands pushing genre envelopes: Schoolyard Heroes, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Kay Kay & His Weathered Underground, Mon Frere, Idiot Pilot, These Arms Are Snakes, The Blood Brothers, and so many more.ย  Among them were Minus the Bear, a phoenix band rising from the ashes of beloved Seattle hardcore […]

Posted inAlbum Review

Album Review: Helenโ€™s The Original Faces in the Rearview Mirror

From visionary Portland musicians Liz Harris, Jed Bindeman, and Scott Simmons, their 2015 LP is a mysterious road trip into the setting sun.

The experimental composer Liz Harrisโ€”best known as Grouperโ€”is Western Oregonโ€™s resident ghost, conjuring delicate whispers and heavy drones that have haunted the bioregion for two decades. Her work drifts between the otherworldly and the intimate, from acclaimed atmospheres on Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008) and Shade (2021) to her electronic collage piece […]

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