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Yerself Is Steam
Yerself Is Steam is the debut studio album by American indie rock band Mercury Rev, released on May 14, 1991. The title is a mondegreen of the phrase "your self-esteem", and is taken from a recurring lyric in opening track "Chasing a Bee". "Car Wash Hair" was released as a single to follow the album. "Very Sleepy Rivers" is a reference to a previous lyric in the album, "your eyes are rivers, they give me shivers." A music video for "Chasing a Bee" was shot at an abandoned infectious disease hospital that once housed Mary Mallon on North Brother Island in New York City, and was directed by Jim Spring and Jens Jurgensen.
Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500 made a guest appearance on "Car Wash Hair" and assisted with recording, allegedly after bassist and engineer Dave Fridmann spent the band's advance on a holiday package.
In Rolling Stone, David Fricke labeled Yerself Is Steam "slacker beat at its most extreme and hypnotic, a marvel of tortured self-absorption and compelling dissonance".
"Music dictated not by logic but by intuition," wrote AllMusic critic Jason Ankeny in a retrospective review, "Yerself Is Steam is an album at war with itself, split by its desire to achieve both melodic pop bliss and white-noise transcendence within the same space; it succeeds brilliantly, avant-bubblegum fuel injected by fits and flourishes of prismatic chaos." In 2016, Pitchfork ranked the record at number 16 on its list of "The 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time", with staff writer Stuart Berman commenting that "Yerself Is Steam is really a shoegaze album in the inverse: Where their fuzz-pedaling peers obliterated the human presence in rock music through a cloud of distortion, Mercury Rev foregrounded the claustrophobic, panicky unease of being trapped inside it."
All tracks are written by Mercury Rev (credited to David Baker, Jonathan Donahue, Sean Mackowiak, and Suzanne Thorpe in the ASCAP Repertory).
In 1992, Mint Films/Jungle re-released Yerself is Steam with a bonus LP/CD entitled Lego My Ego. The title is a parody of the Eggo waffles ad slogan, and is taken from a piece of voice tape at the start of "Frittering," where one musician tells another to "let go of my fucking ego" after they tell him how to play a song. It consists of non-album tracks and a John Peel session from August 1991. Mint Films released another edition in 2007 consisting of both CDs plus an all-region DVD of the videos for "Chasing a Bee" and "Car Wash Hair."
All tracks are written by Mercury Rev, except "If You Want Me to Say" by Sly Stone and "Shhh/Peaceful" by Miles Davis. "Blood on the Moon" has no writer's credit, but is presumably also written by Grasshopper.
Due to time constraints, the LP version eliminates the two previously released singles ("If You Want Me to Stay" and "Car Wash Hair"), and sequences all of the BBC Session tracks together on Side B.
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Yerself Is Steam
Yerself Is Steam is the debut studio album by American indie rock band Mercury Rev, released on May 14, 1991. The title is a mondegreen of the phrase "your self-esteem", and is taken from a recurring lyric in opening track "Chasing a Bee". "Car Wash Hair" was released as a single to follow the album. "Very Sleepy Rivers" is a reference to a previous lyric in the album, "your eyes are rivers, they give me shivers." A music video for "Chasing a Bee" was shot at an abandoned infectious disease hospital that once housed Mary Mallon on North Brother Island in New York City, and was directed by Jim Spring and Jens Jurgensen.
Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500 made a guest appearance on "Car Wash Hair" and assisted with recording, allegedly after bassist and engineer Dave Fridmann spent the band's advance on a holiday package.
In Rolling Stone, David Fricke labeled Yerself Is Steam "slacker beat at its most extreme and hypnotic, a marvel of tortured self-absorption and compelling dissonance".
"Music dictated not by logic but by intuition," wrote AllMusic critic Jason Ankeny in a retrospective review, "Yerself Is Steam is an album at war with itself, split by its desire to achieve both melodic pop bliss and white-noise transcendence within the same space; it succeeds brilliantly, avant-bubblegum fuel injected by fits and flourishes of prismatic chaos." In 2016, Pitchfork ranked the record at number 16 on its list of "The 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time", with staff writer Stuart Berman commenting that "Yerself Is Steam is really a shoegaze album in the inverse: Where their fuzz-pedaling peers obliterated the human presence in rock music through a cloud of distortion, Mercury Rev foregrounded the claustrophobic, panicky unease of being trapped inside it."
All tracks are written by Mercury Rev (credited to David Baker, Jonathan Donahue, Sean Mackowiak, and Suzanne Thorpe in the ASCAP Repertory).
In 1992, Mint Films/Jungle re-released Yerself is Steam with a bonus LP/CD entitled Lego My Ego. The title is a parody of the Eggo waffles ad slogan, and is taken from a piece of voice tape at the start of "Frittering," where one musician tells another to "let go of my fucking ego" after they tell him how to play a song. It consists of non-album tracks and a John Peel session from August 1991. Mint Films released another edition in 2007 consisting of both CDs plus an all-region DVD of the videos for "Chasing a Bee" and "Car Wash Hair."
All tracks are written by Mercury Rev, except "If You Want Me to Say" by Sly Stone and "Shhh/Peaceful" by Miles Davis. "Blood on the Moon" has no writer's credit, but is presumably also written by Grasshopper.
Due to time constraints, the LP version eliminates the two previously released singles ("If You Want Me to Stay" and "Car Wash Hair"), and sequences all of the BBC Session tracks together on Side B.