.........BEFORE.............
It was the rush of sound that first got me. Mount Eerie was a name that meant little to me aside from probably one of those Pitchfork feted acts that are never actually much good, but the press release posted up on the venue website indicated something way beyond Brooklyn/Portland hipster indie. An interesting new musical Venn diagram had been emerging in the late 00s as the dense fog of black metal started to shift away from anything you could conventionally call metal, meeting the lush multilayered palette of shoegaze somewhere in the middle. At the heart of this former no man's land, a thick dark forest lashed by wild winds. What if the wind could talk to us? This is where I found Phil Elverum, a man making records outside and around genre boundaries, his fragile voice and unusually direct words hanging there in the sonic storm.
Wind's Poem did not make my top ten albums of 2009 list. Looking back at that list now, it's a picture of the musical crossroads at which I found myself in my late thirties. "Indie", whatever that means, had started to bore me senseless. Four or five white men in their twenties (this was starting to change, but only just, then) with guitars and bass and drums and songs; it had been my default since my teens and it felt like I'd heard it all, repeatedly. Most of the bright lights of the first half of the decade - those that hadn't already burnt out or disintegrated - were at the difficult third album stage, and yes, a lot of those third albums were pretty difficult to care about. I had been through a lot of personal struggles over the past year and singers singing songs about songy things mostly annoyed me; the sound pictures of various points on the loose "post-rock" spectrum were increasingly where I wanted to be, where I actually felt something. My once beloved British Sea Power had, following one of those mediocre third albums, surprisingly wandered into this territory with an almost entirely instrumental soundtrack album, the point where they were no longer just an indie band (and almost a decade later remain one of my absolute favourite bands, which I don't think would have happened had they stayed in their indie rock lane). Barely half the records I was buying had vocals. But there was something different about Phil Elverum. Every word seemed at once painstakingly chosen yet free flowing, a monologue of blank verse which complemented the melee. I kept going back to it. I'd now place it ahead of most of that list. But it was what he did next that cemented his place in my upper pantheon.
Largely retired from reviewing, in early 2013 I felt compelled to take to the pages of Louder Than War (original link: http://louderthanwar.com/41082/ ) to right the wrong of the two albums which topped my personal list in 2012 remaining absent from most of the published lists...
"They made their way across the sea, six months apart, packaged like gifts from afar. Each box addressed by hand and bound with patterned tape bearing the name of the organisation from which they had originated: P.W.ELVERUM & SUN, LTD. ANACORTES. I looked it up on a map, and things started to make sense. Up there at the western end of the border between Washington State and Canada the coastline dissolves into a scatter of islands and outcrops; the small city of Anacortes is bounded on three sides by water, at the head of a strait that separates the two countries as they reach out into the North Pacific Ocean. It covers the northern third or so of Fidalgo Island where the oceanic crust lifts above sea level; a couple of miles south lies a mountain whose unique geological composition tells stories of uplift and submersion and glacial erosion. Its name is Mount Erie.
This year more than any before I have found fascination in coastlines, the fractal forms and geology and history on the edges of continents; the rift at Thingvellir in Iceland where the North American and Eurasian continental plates meet blew my mind as much as any of the music I heard out there. Sometimes you can hear the landscape in the music; from sea-blasted folk laments to ambient echoes, dreampop atmospheres to the distant rolling thunder of black metal. And there, on the other side of the world, the other side of that continental plate, those same sounds permeate the work of Phil Elverum. Wind, sky, water. The moon pulls those tides; the wind batters the coast; it’s all connected.
In “Clear Moon” the theme centres around home and what that means: the twin titles of “The Place Lives” and its immediate successor “The Place I Live” say so much more than the few words that comprise them, whilst “Ocean Roar” is a walk outside in the dead of night. Elverum described his second album of 2012 as “more challenging and weird and darker and heavier” – which it undoubtedly is – but again, if one considers them the remaining two thirds of a triptych then it’s a reminder that the weather may calm down for a while, but only ever for a while.
Throughout, each layer of sound travels and echoes between the speakers, immersing you in something of the fog which crops up repeatedly in the words. Sometimes it’s like the very music itself is being buffeted around in the weather, Elverum’s voice half-heard against the wind that’s building up again. I wonder if my own affinity with these albums has been influenced not just by those experiences of travels but by the relentless rain that’s lashed our own little island this past year. I’m guessing Anacortes gets its fair share of that, too.
These are not albums to be shoved on repeat, and especially not on shuffle. They are not background. You can use them as backgrounds, sure, and in that context you’ll get a couple of decent ones, although Elverum’s wonderful disdain for the modern fashion of overcompression means you may have some rather quiet spells. Listening, however, is richly rewarded; close your eyes and take a night walk around a small city on the edge of a continent, bounded by water, fog, wind, a mountain, moonlight and the inky blackness beyond."
My copy of his next album "Sauna", released in early 2015, didn't see a lot of turntable time until recently. The noise was quieter, the subject matter smaller. It contains a whole song about seeing a pumpkin while out for a walk. Yet maybe it makes some sense now, in a context we never knew at the time. Elverum was always an extremely private person, his longtime relationship with artist Geneviève Castrée (whose own musical project O PAON supported Mount Eerie at least once when I saw them) none of our business, but we know now that "Sauna" was gestating around the same time as their daughter. The chaotic life of making art when it suited them, wandering around the islands, would presumably have to change. Responsibility, adulthood; the artists recast as parents. Who knows what music he made after that in the parallel universe where life carried on as normal? Did he drift into comfortable indie-folk, or all-out experimentalism? We will never know. The weather may calm down for a while, but only ever for a while. There was another storm on the horizon and not, this time, from the sky. With hindsight, Sauna's low key small world meanderings are the cosy warm-glowing early scenes of a devastating film.
........AFTER........
Walking out to some northern quarter venue earlier this year, checking facebook for stage times as I waited to cross a road, a post from my friend Ian caught my eye. New Mount Eerie? Ooh. It's a youtube link but there'll probably be a release date and stuff in the blurbs. There might have been, I can't remember. There were lyrics, though. And thus it was walking down Aytoun Street that I saw those words for the first time; later, at home, heard them.
“In October 2015, I was out in the yard, I just finished splitting up the scrap two-by-fours into kindling, I glanced up at the half moon pink chill refinery cloud light. Two big black birds flew over, their wings whooshing and low. Two ravens, but only two, their black feathers tinted in the sunset. I knew these birds were omens but of what I wasn't sure. They were flying out toward the island where we hoped to move. You were probably inside. You were probably aching, wanting not to die...”
Talk about floored.
Geneviève died in the summer of 2016, a year or so after a mention of some minor pain at a post-natal check-up led to a scan and a diagnosis of a type of cancer that doesn't see a whole lot of people talking about post-chemo hair and disease-free anniversaries. Phil didn't want to make music, but it came anyway, Sparse, broken, his direct style of wordsmithery forcing the listener to acknowledge his wracked grief. And there was going to be... a whole album of this? At which point you stop and say, hang on, do I want to hear this? Should I want to hear this? I wasn't sure. In 2017 we often subconsciously put everything through the "is it problematic?" filter. Isn't this just grief tourism, grief porn even? Just because a man (who may or may not have been entirely of sound mind) made this record doesn't mean it's OK to enjoy it, or does it? But we watched Nick Cave on the big screen channeling his grief into art. And anyway, a young widower with a chaotic artist's income has a child to support, so take my money. When the needle finally hit the record, it was harrowing... heart-wrenching... but what a record.
The space looms as loudly as those sheets of noise once did. Yes, it still sounds exactly like Mount Eerie only with little more than a voice and a guitar. I've personally never really been much of a fan of the "stripped down" version of bands I like; very little in music disappoints quite as much as seeing the name of a band I like (in reference to a new track or a newly announced gig) followed by the word "acoustic". But here, there's quite enough going on. You never miss the noise because it's still so very present, raging through the open windows and out across the water.
I don't think I've ever seen so many words packed into the lyric sheet of a single album. Open the floodgate and the words rush into pools, making pictures more vivid even than those wind/sky/ocean tableaux. You're there, looking through the windows as he clears out her clothes because they're just things, as he glances at the photos on the fridge, as he takes in a parcel and finds it's a backpack for when his daughter starts school and realises Geneviève was planning for a future for which she knew she may not be present. You watch him as he takes a boat out to the island where they'd half planned to go and live, or as he hikes up a deserted trail with his daughter on his back, asleep wrapped in her mother's hat. You see nature through his eyes: the colour of the sky, the foxgloves growing by the path (did she like foxgloves? He can't quite remember, now), the water and the wind and the mountains. The same water and wind and mountains he was writing about a few years aago, but the perspective is different: where just three years ago on "Sauna" he muses about emptiness, here "conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about before I knew my way around these hospitals". Taking the garbage out at night he still feels "with the universe, the thunder and lightning coming in over the mountains" but then he has to go back inside to a house full of the space where someone used to be.
There is, of course, no closure. There are glimmers of light, though, up on that trail as the needle traces the final grooves to the end of side two:
“All the usual birds were gone or freezing
It was all silent except the sound of one crow
Following us as we wove through the cedar grove
I walked and you bobbed and dozed
Sweet kid, we were watched and followed and I thought of Geneviève
Sweet kid, I heard you murmur in your sleep
"Crow," you said
"Crow," and I asked
"Are you dreaming about a crow?"
And there she was”
Even copying that here, without the record on, I'm struck by its simple, devastating beauty. As he ended his set in Leeds in November - one of just a handful of live dates, touring as the single parent of a small child is never going to be easy whatever the circumstances - there were a few silent seconds before the (massive) applause: it wasn't really a gig anyone would have been at if they didn't know what they were going to see. I looked around the room and realised every stranger and a couple of friends in there had at some point heard this record for the first time, possibly, like me, uncertain as to whether they wanted to, and then sat there an hour or so later wondering where those goosebumps and tears came from.
How could this be album of the year? It can't be, because that would indicate some level of rating against other records, and that's not really possible. Or indeed some recommendation to drop what you're doing and listen, but that's not going to happen either. For a start, it's an incredible album that was never meant to exist. And it probably isn't for most people. I don't know how it would work if you didn't already have half a foot in Elverum world. Yet for those of us who did, because at some point in our lives this rather ordinary looking bloke from a strange volcanic peninsula was there in our own darker times, how could this not be album of the year?
