Taking the sound evolved by The Flaming Lips in 1989-90 to its next phase, Mercury Rev convincingly presented Yerself Is Steam as the ultimate modernist expression of psychedelic noise-pop to that date. Like another American band, Medicine, Mercury Rev were able to exceed most of their British peers in the field of ultra-distorted guitar pop-rock daze by dint of creating memorable tunes with a coherent meta-narrative, a fast-diminishing commodity as the 1990s progressed.