Yerself Is Steam
Yerself Is Steam is the 1991 debut album by Mercury Rev. The title is a mondegreen of the phrase "Your self-esteem", and is taken from a recurring lyric in the opening "Chasing a Bee". "Car Wash Hair" was released as a single to follow the album. "Very Sleepy Rivers" is supposedly about a serial killer, with the river acting as a metaphor for the killer's relative calm and sudden tendency to snap.
| Yerself Is Steam | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studio album | ||||
| Released | May 14, 1991 | |||
| Recorded | 1990–1991 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 49:19 (UK) 57:09 (US) | |||
| Label |
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| Producer | Mercury Rev | |||
| chronology | ||||
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| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic | |
| Chicago Tribune | |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
| Pitchfork | 9.3/10 |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| Select | 5/5 |
A music video for the song "Chasing a Bee" was shot at an abandoned infectious disease hospital that once housed "Typhoid Mary" on North Brother Island in New York City, and was directed by Jim Spring and Jens Jurgensen.
Dean Wareham made a guest appearance on "Car Wash Hair" and helped with recording, supposedly after Fridmann spent the band's advance on a holiday package.
In 2016, Pitchfork ranked the album at number 16 in its list of "The 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time", 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."