Mercury Rev preps comp, film score

Veteran indie band compiles two-CD set of faves and oddities, scores a French film, and begins work on a new album.

More than 15 years on, indie rock vets Mercury Rev show no sign of slowing down.

The New York collective recently compiled a two-CD set of favorite tracks of the past 15 years and has also created the soundtrack for a new French film. Not content to stop there, the band has a pair of live shows this weekend and is beginning work on a new album.

The double set, dubbed The Essential Mercury Rev--The Weird Years 1991-2006, contains 32 tracks of the band's favorite tracks over the years and several B-sides, including a cover of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" that drummer Jeff Mercel called a "very unusual sounding track."

"The first disc has some of our favorites," Mercel told Billboard. "It's a good sampler, like a box of candy. We took all the maple creams out, the ones people pinch."

The compilation is only available for sale through the band's Web site.

The band recorded the soundtrack under the name Hello Blackbird and composed it for the film Bye Bye Blackbird from French filmmaker Robinson Savary. The movie took five years to complete.

"[Savary] proposed an idea for a film about a circus in the early 1900s that was traveling through Europe," Mercel said. "Circuses were on the decline, as new forms like cinema were on the rise. A strange romance evolves as well."

"There is a little bit of vocals, but by and large, 95 percent of it is instrumental," he said of the film score. "It doesn't always have the standard song form. Mostly, we tried to create an alternate reality for the film. The imagery is so obviously tied to the circus, but we thought the music should maybe be a bit more inside the mind of the characters."

Mercury Rev is set to play its final two concerts of the year this weekend with a Friday night show in New York City and a Saturday night show in Buffalo, New York.

The band is in the early stages of work on a new album, a follow-up to 2005's The Secret Migration. The album is being produced by longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann.

"Right now, it's still those little sparks," Mercel told Billboard. "You get a little idea of what's to come, but we haven't really pushed anything much further than that. We're collecting a lot of small ideas. But we'll definitely be working with Dave. In some capacity, we're always involved with him. The relationship has changed now that we have our own functional studio, so some of the roles sort of cross. But it's still a very collaborative effort."