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about this album
Deserter's Songs is the fourth studio album by the Buffalo, New York-based rock band Mercury Rev, released in late September 1998. British music magazine NME named Deserter's Songs album of the year for 1998. Limited edition copies of the album came in a brown cardboard envelope-like package, with a stamp on the cover postmarked with the release date, as well as two art postcards. The success of this album was a pleasant surprise for the band. After the commercial failure of See You on the Other Side, which Donahue considered to be the band's best album, they decided to make one more record entirely for themselves, ignoring commercial influences, and expecting to split up shortly afterward. Surprisingly, Deserter's Songs was their most successful album, and made them big celebrities in the UK and Europe, also making a smaller mark in the US. The hidden track at the end of "Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp" is played on the Tettix Wave Accumulator, an instrument built by Donahue and Grasshopper. Reportedly, two versions of the instrument exist--one for recording that takes up half of Grasshopper's basement, and a smaller one for the road. A 10th anniversary edition of the album was rumored to be released on March 5, 2007, but never came to fruition. Mercury Rev released their seventh studio album Snowflake Midnight on Deserter's Songs' actual 10-year anniversary, September 29, 2008. In May 2011 a fully instrumental edition of the album was released. In the same month, the band a
