Plumbiferous Media

Mount Eerie is led by Phil Elverum and fol­lows directly from his pre­vi­ous group, The Micro­phones. By com­bin­ing indie and folk with lo-fi aes­thet­ics, as well as sub­stan­tial influ­ence from metal and noise music, Elverum has cre­ated a wholly new sort of musi­cal expe­ri­ence. It is this expe­ri­ence that has defined his work with Mount Eerie, includ­ing the group’s newest album, Wind’s Poem - an absolutely amaz­ing exam­ple of all of the sorts of music it rep­re­sents, and a fun­da­men­tally excel­lent album.

The genius of Wind’s Poem’s design is Mount Eerie’s use of instru­ments to cre­ate a true shape and mood through­out the album. “Wind’s Dark Poem” begins the album with an amor­phous mass of sound, but through sub­tle changes, the sound is forced into an incred­i­ble shape that occa­sion­ally lets strains of melody show through. Track three, “My Heart Is Not at Peace” is the first to allow melodies to fully appear, cre­at­ing a beau­ti­ful track and an excel­lent con­trast to the pre­vi­ous two. The next track then changes the sound alto­gether, return­ing to one more closely resem­bling the open­ing track, while still remain­ing con­nected to the melodic devel­op­ment of the album by using sim­i­lar strains of melodies as with “My Heart Is Not at Peace.” Through all of Wind’s Poem, Elverum uses any and every uncon­ven­tional tech­nique from com­plete absence of macro-rhythm to har­monic impre­ci­sion seam­lessly within the sound he cre­ates, adding per­fectly to the music that never requires it, but always ben­e­fits from it.

And even when the album turns towards con­ven­tion (and increased activ­ity) in “Between Two Mys­ter­ies” and “Ancient Ques­tions,” the tracks lose no amount of qual­ity - only, on some level, a cer­tain amount of inge­nu­ity that kept the album engag­ing through the ear­lier, more lethar­gic tracks. Finally, Wind’s Poem con­cludes with “Stone’s Ode,” which man­ages to syn­the­size the entire album into a sin­gle track while still remain­ing per­fectly unique. From start to fin­ish, Wind’s Poem is musi­cally beau­ti­ful, as pow­er­ful as the track’s sub­jects, and immensely creative.

Phil Elverum’s voice enters Wind’s Poem at an almost unfath­omable depth, crushed under the weight of a sheet of sound but still some­how pos­sess­ing an incred­i­ble pres­ence - a beau­ti­fully melded tone beneath the music. Elverum’s sim­ple vocals slowly melt into and through the thick sta­tic of “Wind’s Dark Poem,” cre­at­ing an expe­ri­ence that is wholly dif­fer­ent than any of the ele­ments cre­at­ing it. As the lis­tener focuses on Elverum’s muted, ghostly tones, the level of detail present in every part of Wind’s Poem becomes incred­i­bly clear. Wind’s Poem is not a single-layered album, nor is it a double- or triple- lay­ered one: it is com­posed of a vast num­ber of con­stantly shift­ing lay­ers through which Elverum’s voice slips, alter­nately com­bin­ing with and sep­a­rat­ing from the res­o­nance of the music.

As is imme­di­ately clear from the track titles of Wind’s Poem, the album is built upon a great deal of sym­bol­ism as well as a cer­tain con­nec­tion to nature, which man­i­fests itself not only in the man­ner in which much of the sound of Wind’s Poem has an obvi­ous nat­ural influ­ence, but in the tales Elverum tells through­out the album. Tracks such as “The Mouth of Sky” and “Wind Speaks” dis­play this directly, as Elverum’s words com­bine with the soar­ing music to cre­ate a feel­ing quite strongly related to the band’s tit­u­lar Mount Eerie. On other tracks, Elverum draws these con­nec­tions more directly through his lyrics, as on “Between Two Mys­ter­ies,” where he sings “The town rests in the val­ley between twin peaks / Buried in space / What goes on up there at night? / In that dark blurry place,” cre­at­ing a dark but col­or­ful image of tow­er­ing moun­tain peaks. What­ever the method, Elverum never fails to cre­ate intensely engag­ing imagery, expertly plac­ing the lis­tener among his intri­cate images.

On Wind’s Poem, Phil Elverum not only cre­ates twelve musi­cal, lyri­cally enchant­ing tracks, but merges the lyrics per­fectly into the music, reflect­ing in the instru­men­tals as well as the vocals the ele­ments he describes. And not only has Elverum recorded twelve excel­lent tracks, but he has recorded an album. Each track links, whether sub­tly, or through com­plete oppo­si­tion, to the next - melod­i­cally, har­mon­i­cally, and the­mat­i­cally. Wind’s Poem is noth­ing short of perfect.

This post is tagged 90-100, Mount Eerie