Phil Elverum has been performing the songs from his new
Mount Eerie album, Wind’s Poem, for the better
part of the past year, and I have to say, the stuff wasn’t really
sweeping me away. Sometimes, as at Fremont Abbey in March, he performed
the songs solo, accompanying his distinctive, slightly mumbly singing
on electric guitar, punctuating his lyrics with low, growling feedback.
More recently, as at Neumos in June, Elverum has performed the material
backed by a live band featuring thundering, blast-beating dual
drummers.
There was nothing wrong with these performances, and the electrified
treatment—with its dark drones, relatively heavy riffing (and
matching slow-motion head banging), and ringing open chords—is as
impressive as any other guise with which Elverum has dressed his songs.
(Elverum has lately spoken of seeking an organic or “wooden”
black-metal sound.) I just wasn’t hearing as much from the songs
themselves.
So it was a quiet, welcome revelation this weekend to spend some
time with the new album and hear what I’d somehow been missing at those
shows.
The album begins with a crescendo of drums and guitar, a blast of
sound that within seconds, and without actually changing, becomes an
almost ambient hum. Like many doom/drone metallers, Elverum uses
distortion, distilled riffing, and blanketing percussion to generate
texture more than dynamics—and to effectively evoke the howl of a
harsh wind. But even when the instruments around him are roaring,
Elverum’s songs are deliberately paced and his singing hushed, creating
an audio image that reiterates his oldest themes: Here’s
Nature/the Universe/the Wind, huge and overwhelming, and here’s Phil,
small and quiet and straining. Elverum employs this approach to great
effect on “Wind’s Dark Poem,” “The Hidden Stone,” and “The Mouth of
Sky.”
Other tracks are more conventionally placid, eschewing the
noisy atmospherics and metal affectations for soft, glassy keyboard
padding. The slow-stirring “Through the Trees” is an extended
church-organ reverie. “Between Two Mysteries” interpolates the melody
and even the chilly synth sound from Angelo Badalamenti’s theme for
Twin Peaks. The chorus of “Ancient Questions,” with Elverum
singing “Nothing is nothing/Everything is fleeting” over rippling
guitar, piano, and marimba, almost echoes the more uplifted bridge
about “bass drums at dances” from earlier Mount Eerie track “We’re Here
to Listen.”
The album climaxes with a pair of songs that incorporate both modes.
“Something” begins with unsettling, stereo-lurching static, all
bass thrum and broken cymbal crashes, before giving way to a faint
music-box melody. On “Lost Wisdom Pt. 2,” a massive din blows out into
muted, shuddering tones.
Perhaps what most separates these songs from his earlier work, and
what might make them less endearing to some listeners, is that while
Elverum has always looked into the proverbial dark night with wonder
and dread, he formerly managed to find some beacon of solace
there. Here, that moon shines only in his mind. Here, he sings “My
Heart Is Not at Peace” and sounds genuinely troubled and lost.
