Betrayal hurts in personal relationships, but it stings even more in the bond between band and fan. With death-and-taxes certainty, everyone will feel double-crossed by a band they adore, as musicians change directions and their followers undergo shifts in aesthetics. But there are varying degrees of unfaithfulness, and the one some aging aficionados feel toward Mercury Rev is arguably among the most painful in the annals of musical obsession.

The long path from Yerself Is Steam's "Chasing a Bee" (1991) to the recent The Secret Migration's "Down Poured the Heavens" is strewn with many phantasmagorical flashes of genius, bloated mawkishness, and ponderous psych-lite. Watching Mercury Rev's career since the upstate New York band's druggy zenith on their Steam debut to their current status as overrated darlings of slick UK mags has been akin to watching cult author Thomas Pynchon bag literature for a soap opera-writing gig.

In the early '90s, Mercury Rev reigned as America's greatest rock band, its grand sorcerers of whirlwind psychedelic beauty and chaos. Steam and 1993's Boces deserved their own laser-light shows and made you feel as if your blood had been replaced with rocket fuel.

It would be churlish to chastise Mercury Rev for not replicating ad infinitum Steam and Boces; personnel changes (notably mad singer David Baker's departure after Boces), record-label politics, and tumultuous life experiences altered the conditions that led to their diabolical magic. But it would be lax to let the band go unscathed for committing unforgivably schmaltzy songs to tape over the three albums following 1995's transitional--and oft-sublime--See You on the Other Side.

Following See You, Mercury Rev reached a crisis. The band lost a year of productivity while trying to leave Sony Records and then primary songwriter/guitarists Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper struggled with substance abuse, personality conflicts, and botched relationships. They were broke and reduced to menial labor. "I was working in a plastic-bottle factory, Jonathan was doing construction," Grasshopper recalls. "But then we got together and made Deserter's Songs [in 1998 for new label V2], and a lot of that desperation fueled that album. People seemed to like it… thank god."

Deserter's Songs rocketed Mercury Rev to massive acclaim in the European press and they routinely packed 7,000-capacity venues on that continent. The album launched a new phase in which grandiose balladic structures dominate and Donahue relinquishes all rock aggression from his voice in exchange for a choir-boy-innocent croon. Deserter's Songs and its 2001 follow-up, All Is Dream, are designed to tug on your heartstrings till they fray. Long gone is the exhilarating delirium of the Rev's early songs.

Does Grasshopper ever miss the madness of those early years? "Not really," he says, "because it's still pretty mad, but not in a violent way. We seem to attract weirdness at every turn. Touring is always an adventure. I live in Kingston, New York, and Jonathan and Jeff [Mercel, multi-instrumentalist] live in the Catskills. It's kind of a Twin Peaks/Blue Velvet kind of vibe. We feed off of that."

If only Mercury Rev's new album, The Secret Migration, possessed more of that weird Lynchian aura. Recorded in their new Catskills studio, the 13-track opus sounds like their most cheerful album yet. It's also the weakest of the band's six full-lengths, though it's predictably earning sparkling reviews in UK glossies like Uncut and Mojo. But it's telling when an album's best cut is a 78-second homage to early-'70s Beach Boys ("Moving On"). Most of the disc is marred by a sentimentality that makes Paul McCartney sound like a hard-bitten cynic. The bulk of Migration is oleaginous, soft-centered dad rock. Mercury Rev are growing old too gracefully.

"I see the connection between all the records," Grasshopper says in re-sponse to an observation about the stark divide in Mercury Rev's early and late phases. "Pushing the form versus content of music and exploring soundscapes. In the early records, it might've been layers of orchestrating guitars and now it's orchestrating strings and key- boards. But a lot of the process is still the same and the way we record is still the same. All the way back to 'Frittering' and 'Car Wash Hair,' we've been trying to express some kind of love song in a fucked-up, warped way--the jubilation and pain that you extract from that."

"But even the newer stuff is a lot more chaotic live than it is on the record." Betrayed Mercury Rev fans sure hope so.

segal@thestranger.com