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Screw Coldplay – get pumped for Mercury Rev. Hamish McKenzie talks to Revver Jeff Mercel ahead of the biggest show of the year

Forget Coldplay. Yeah, they’ll fill the AsiaWorld-Arena, and, sure, they’ll have people dancing euphorically in the aisles. Fans will swoon over the gawky Chris Martin, and there’ll be a screamfest when they play that song about the stars being all yellow. (Actually, stars vary in colour: the hottest are bluish, while the coolest are dark red. But that doesn’t make such a snappy pop hook, does it?)

But for music fans, the real reason to get excited will be on stage for just 40 minutes, as the opening act. New York State’s Mercury Rev, a three-piece often mentioned in the same breath as The Flaming Lips (see, just did it!), released two of 2008’s best albums: the blindingly ethereal Midnight Snowflake, and its free, accompanying instrumental work, Strange Attractor (available together on vinyl).

Midnight Snowflake, which made numerous top 50 lists and was described in a five-star review by Time Out as “dreamy avant-pop… offset by throbbing ambient house and proggy neoclassicism”, catapulted Mercury Rev back into the limelight, marking the biggest impact on their 25-year career since 1998’s Deserter’s Songs, which brought them both critical and commercial success.

It might seem strange, then, that these guys would end up fluffing the crowd for such mainstream giants as Coldplay.

“You’re playing for quite a few people who [aren’t] necessarily familiar with us, so it’s a little bit of a challenge, but it’s kind of fun,” says drummer and keyboardist Jeff Mercel over the phone from a hotel in Melbourne, where the Rev played three dates with the world’s biggest band. “You see some interesting looks on people’s faces when they’re trying to work out who we are and what we’re doing, but by the end of the set, you get the feeling that maybe you’ve converted a few, and maybe there’s a few people out there who are digging what we’re doing.”

Mercel says the band took a new approach to Snowflake Midnight, abandoning their instrumental instincts in favour of experimentation with tools – especially programming – out of their creative comfort zone. “No matter what you do, there’s always an element of control, but I think we just changed the process, whereby we made the record thinking, almost looking at it like a scientific experiment – you know, if you change the steps in the experiment, the outcome is going to be different,” says Mercel. “Sometimes it’s good to put yourself on the back foot when you’re recording, take yourself out of that comfort zone, where you’re forced to reach for something a little bit different or a little bit deeper than what you would typically do.”

While cutting a new course, however, Snowflake Midnight retains a big, almost galactic feel, redolent with old synths and post-techno beats, and teeming with the expansiveness for which Mercury Rev are known. “We try and create sounds that we can get lost in; something large enough that we can crawl inside and explore,” says Mercel, adding that the band are still fans of creating albums that should be listened to in one sitting and regarded as a whole, rather than the sum of their parts.

“I feel like it changes,” Mercel says of Snowflake Midnight. “It moves in places where maybe you expected it to do one thing and it does another. I like the way it moves along from one song to the next in a continuous – not train of thought, but I feel like it’s almost one long song.”

Funny he should say that – you could say the exact same thing about the band themselves. And that’s why, come Wednesday 25, you should be excited to see that 40-minute slot before Gwyneth’s hubby comes on to sing scientifically-inaccurate ditties about the nebula.

Mercury Rev open for Coldplay on Wednesday 25 at AsiaWorld-Arena.