HOW do you follow that cast-iron, bona fide masterpiece; the epic you know everyone will hark back to as the remainder of your career unfolds?

It may irritate like gravel in an ill-fitting shoe, but perennial outsiders and full-time recluses Mercury Rev must be fully aware of such a scenario. Their awesome Deserter's Songs will always be the superbly varnished yardstick by which any future ouput will be measured.

Ghoulish frontman Jonathan Donahue could create a vaccine to cure all disease, eradicate Third World debt and single-handedly capture bin Laden, but some miserly music hack would still grumble that they preferred him when he sang Goddess On A Highway, like a choirboy well versed in the occult.

Swooping on 1998 like a vampire at dusk, Deserter's Songs created an impossibly blissful, enchanting fantasia over a dozen tracks. After the darker nightmares of 2001's All Is Dream, where will their latest trip take us?

Donaghue's pastoral lyricism, twinned with the Rev's trademark 'back to nature' sound, creates another sumptuous-sounding record.

Opener Secret For A Song and the Spector-esque In A Funny Way provide a stirring backbone, while the nursery rhyme quaintness of Across Yer Ocean and In the Wilderness wield killer hooks behind that familiar icy Catskill mountain swirl.

Probably their poppiest effort to date, big brash tracks such as Vermillion and Black Forest up the tempo, but sadly this consistently enjoyable migration ends with a whimper: the flimsy Down Poured The Heavens is a drippy relative of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Our House.

The Secret Migration may lack some of Deserter's Songs mystical charms, but don't fret: this Mercury's still on the rise.

Updated: 09:13 Thursday, January 27, 2005