Imagine Dragons Mercury Album Download
Despite the ostensibly humanizing presence of Rick Rubin, rock’s patron saint of prestige, these quintessential Vegas showmen continue to sound like they’re firing their emotions from a T-shirt cannon.
Other Las Vegas rock bands have existed, but none have captured the essence of the city like Imagine Dragons. Each of the band’s albums has played like an imagined Cirque Du Soleil production, packed with all the pyrotechnics and budget-busting pageantry of the Strip, as if they were designed for stages rather than stereos. If you’ve never seen a picture of frontman Dan Reynolds before—and, despite the band’s massive success, many people haven’t—you might think he looks like Criss Angel.
Imagine Dragons‘ embrace of brute-force spectacle has made them one of modern rock’s few true blockbuster attractions, as well as one of the most streamed bands of the Spotify era. However, monetizing music is not the same as getting people to care about it. With no central personality for fans to root for, the band can appear as anonymous as the black-shirted techies who fill the Wynn Encore Theater every night. Reynolds works to change that on their fifth album, Mercury – Act 1, collaborating with rock’s patron saint of prestige, Rick Rubin, for a humanizing makeover, complete with the obligatory songs about suffering and mortality that Rubin expects from all of his charges.
Overstatement is still this band’s raison d’être, so for the majority of Mercury, they fire their emotions like a T-shirt cannon. Reynolds’ snarl-yell, which has been his trademark since “Radioactive,” is one of the most grating sounds in popular music, and he goes completely nuclear with it on “Dull Knives,” which stews in wall-punching rage even as it begs for empathy: “I’m crying for help, it’s such a cliché/Invisible pain, it’s filling each day.” Worse is “Cutthroat,” a fuckshitty, you-want-a-piece-of-me Woodstock ’99 throwback that’s the dirtiest thing Fred Durst ever wrote. Ironically, that song is immediately followed by “No Time for Toxic People,” a true Spider-Man-pointing-at-Spider-Man moment: If you want to cut toxic people out of your life, start with the people who wrote “Cutthroat.”
It’s extremely rare to hear an album speak incoherently from both sides of its mouth while pandering desperately in all directions. Mercury tries to be everything to everyone, but it’s mostly a headache, a grim study of how patronizing popular music can be in 2021. Imagine Dragons do show signs of maturation on occasion, but these don’t amount to much; attempts at maturity don’t go very far on an album that mostly sounds like a truck full of teenagers driving by and flashing the shocker at you.
Listen and share your thoughts on this amazing project.
