Mount Eerie - Now Only

Bandcamp Daily

Phil Elverum’s 2017 album examined the short-term impact of death; his latest explores the months and years that follow.

Tue Mar 20 13:40:13 GMT 2018

Tiny Mix Tapes 100

Mount Eerie
Now Only

[P.W. Elverum & Sun; 2018]

Rating: 5/5

I imagine I was a lot like Phil Elverum as a kid: unsatisfied, ambitious, and squirming. I didn’t long for answers as much as I longed for affirmation (from teachers and mothers and priests and neighbors and Godfathers) that “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” was absolute, that Heaven was real and that those poor in spirit would inherit it, that those of us who are constantly overcome with anxiety would eventually be comforted. At recess in grade school, in that wooden bee-infested playhouse where I discovered words like “fuck” and “pussy,” I scrawled beatitudes. Now, I can’t recall them all. I do remember: I took Sunday School awfully seriously; I pictured Jesus in thrift store robes, performing miracles for people who prayed or for whom prayers were addressed. Like Phil, I remain stubborn and restless. When I finally realize that life ends and is just over, I will have swallowed an ulcer full of tears. Until then, I still have bits of different words for Heaven stuck in my brain like shards of glass keeping me from bleeding out. I still picture a wedding:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’”

–John 21:1-4

When I was 10 years old, my grandmother died of uterine cancer, and I spent 15 years not crying about it. Since then, whenever I think about what dying means, I feel like bursting with swallowed tears from my gut. On days when I can only picture walking through a valley and a shadow with a backpack and a tent, I can feel my cells dividing, abnormally, in organs that I don’t have. There’s something about death that feels contagious, like yawning or sneezing, but it took three physicians to confirm that my distress was real. So now I take pills and I cry into pillows (it’s OK), and despite my academic distrust in salvation, I pray:

“You keep my eyelids from closing;
I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old,
and remember the years of long ago.
I commune with my heart in the night.”

–Psalm 77:4

And yet: “sometimes, people get killed before they get to finish all of the things they were going to do.” In high school, in between dramatic readings of “Howl” and “Sunflower Sutra,” I fell in love with absurdism — L’Étranger by Albert Camus, in particular — I suppose because it offered literary reprieve from my Catholic guilt. Its tragedy shaped my sense of empathy for men who can’t cry, even at funerals. I identified with Meursault, not because I felt like a stranger in my own world (and at times I did), but because nobody deserves a story that starts with: “Mother died today.” But in reality, mothers are constantly dying; some of them will be remembered and some of them won’t, and which of their lives will echo beyond their actual ends is dictated by legacies of cruelty and chance. I hope that when I’m gone, people will remember me as a flicker of light, and that when my light is extinguished, people will still remember those who made my life brighter, and that some mother will talk her kid into reading something from the Bible, and that my life will have spoken clear and metaphor-free:

“The unfolding of your words gives light;
it imparts understanding to the simple.”

–Psalm 119:130

In December 2015, after five and a half years of fighting breast cancer, my stepsister died. Our family dog, unaware of what exactly was wrong, nuzzled my niece’s arm when my stepmother told her that her mother was in a better place, one of those hundreds of words for worlds without end tucked into heads of anyone who’s ever lost someone. After Phil’s last album, I kept seeing crows everywhere, and I wondered whether it was a normal number of crows for someone to see on a regular basis in Wisconsin or whether one of them was my grandmother, sad and incomplete and grieving for lacking what so many needed from her presence, or whether one of them was my sister, maternal and steadying and proud.

And then, distortion…

The first time I listened to Now Only, it was raining and I cried for 10 minutes; after it ended, like a body after an exorcism, I felt lighter, and when I looked out of my window, into a black night, there were no crows or rainbows or signs, but inside of my room, inside of my body

light gleamed.

Now Only by Mount Eerie

Fri Mar 16 04:09:33 GMT 2018

Drowned In Sound 90

In 2016, the artist Geneviève Castrée died after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Barely 35, she was survived by her husband, Phil Elverum, and their one year-old daughter. Long known for his work as The Microphones and later Mount Eerie, Elverum set about capturing the toxic shock of this loss in a collection of spare, harrowing songs that documented, in vivid detail, the later days of Geneviève’s life, the chasm left by her absence, and the grief he felt through it all. These raw reflections, written and recorded in the very room where Geneviève passed away, were released as 2017’s A Crow Looked at Me, an album that quickly became Elverum’s most beloved and critically-acclaimed work in years.

Now Only by Mount Eerie

To say that these songs were 'raw' is not to offer any kind of platitude. It is not the same as saying that Elverum writes 'from the heart,' or more simply, that his music is 'sincere.' Brutally stripped of the metaphor and allusion that couches so much other songwriting on the topic, these 11 songs detailed the daily reality of death and the agony which accompanies it to the point that they made me wince. A Crow Looked at Me found the memory of Geneviève embedded in everyday objects: the mail she still received, items she had thrown into the trash before her passing, the place she used to call home (“I watched you die in this room/then I gave your clothes away/I’m sorry”). It balked at the fragility of Elverum’s memory of her (“… these photographs we have of you/are slowly replacing the subtle, familiar/memory of what it’s like to know you’re in the other room”). The knife was occasionally given an extra twist through reference to the daughter they had together (“our daughter is one and a half/you have been dead 11 days”). It found, above all, that mortality pays little respect to our wants, needs, plans, hopes, and dreams.

A year on, Now Only continues to trace the trajectory of Elverum’s grief. These are still songs about Geneviève and her absence. Much like its predecessor, it is also at pains to depict the stark reality of death instead of diluting it as poetry. Statements like “but you’re sleeping, out in the yard now” are no sooner sung than retracted. “What am I saying?,” Elverum asks himself. “No one is sleeping.” But where the purview of A Crow Looked at Me was the gut-punch felt in the immediate aftermath Geneviève’s death, this record captures Elverum as his grief “becomes calcified”, as he attempts to pick up the remaining pieces, and, somehow, resume his life. Throughout, we hear him attempt to work out precisely what Geneviève is to him now; where she sits on the vectors between person, memory, ghost, and the material objects she left behind. It is a question and contradiction boldly captured in the record’s opening two lines: “I sing to you/you don’t exist.

In these more distanced meditations on death and mortality, one theme that emerges is the absurdity that Elverum finds in the very act of carrying on. But, as we are reminded on the title track, this absurdity is also magnified by the cruel success of A Crow Looked at Me, something in which Elverum is at least able to find a kind of morbid humour. “The next thing I knew”, he sings, “I was standing in the dirt, under the desert sky at night, outside Phoenix at a music festival that had paid to fly me in, to play these death songs to a bunch of young people on drugs.” This observation dovetails into an anecdote about an evening spent rattling around a backstage area in the company of Weyes Blood and Father John Misty. He concludes: “to be still alive felt so absurd”, before launching into a perky refrain befitting Randy Newman, but sung to the words “people get cancer and die/people get hit by trucks and die/people just living their lives get erased for no reason/with the rest of us averting our eyes.

Moments like this aside, Now Only is largely cut from the same musical cloth as its predecessor. Elverum’s style, as ever, has a quite literary quality about it, his delivery meandering—at times understandably deflated—with shades of Leonard Cohen and contemporaries like Mark Kozelek. It would almost feel like stream-of-consciousness, were his observations on the absurdity of his quotidian existence not punctuated by insights far too piercing to be off-the-cuff. But although Now Only is musically similar to A Crow Looked at Me, its scope is also broadened, at least partly reemerging from the catatonia imposed by Geneviève’s death. Most obviously, these six songs are far longer than the short, intense vignettes of A Crow Looked at Me, its longest (‘Distortion’) lasting almost 11 minutes. And although the soft flow of a nylon-stringed guitar is still Elverum’s weapon of choice, here it is embellished with more varied instrumentation: a grunge-y stab of overdriven guitar punctuates the beginning of ‘Distortion,’ and a fog of static briefly envelops ‘Earth’.

All too often we equate songwriting with a kind of poetry. But in Geneviève’s absence, Elverum finds no use for poetry, or at least he finds that poetry is not up to the task of capturing his despair. Instead, on Now Only as on A Crow Looked at Me, Elverum assumes the role of documentarian, exorcising his grief by painfully recording its every detail in song. Telling that in a recent interview, Elverum noted that 'I had more to say still. And I didn’t want to stay in that feeling of A Crow Looked at Me. I knew the only way out was to continue writing songs. There wasn’t even really a gap in the production. I just kept writing.' Like its predecessor, Now Only lays profoundly bare Elverum’s grief. But although it is often an excruciating listen, it also finds room to step, however briefly, outside of the agony that marked its predecessor, if just for long enough to suggest that Elverum is, somehow, beginning to find some relief in the unbearable.

![105479](http://dis.resized.images.s3.amazonaws.com/540x310/105479.jpeg)

Wed Mar 21 16:25:51 GMT 2018

Pitchfork 85

The expansive companion album to last year’s A Crow Looked At Me is no less a marvel. Phil Elverum’s latest is part memoir and part magnum opus, sung softly and with wonder.

Fri Mar 16 05:00:00 GMT 2018

The Guardian 60

Phil Elverum’s last album focused unsparingly on his wife’s death, and a year later, the loss is still paralysing, though leavened with tiny moments of hope

It’s not often that an artist describes their latest work as “barely music”, but that was the frank assessment posited by singer-songwriter Phil Elverum about his eighth album under the name Mount Eerie, 2017’s A Crow Looked at Me.

Elverum had a point. Since the late 90s, when he began releasing music as frontman of Olympia indie band the Microphones, Elverum has pursued the kind of uncompromising, esoteric career that invites listeners to either doggedly follow him down whatever unlikely musical path his muse leads, or get lost. There have been albums inspired by Norwegian black metal, albums filled with old songs rerecorded using Apple’s basic music software GarageBand and Auto-Tune vocals, an album consisting solely of the drum tracks from a previous album. It’s a wilfully abstruse oeuvre that has led to critical acclaim. In some corners of the online music press, Elverum’s position as an idiosyncratic genius whose work encompasses an “epic, ongoing existential puzzle” is an article of faith. You can find reviews that, without irony, compare his lyrics to the novels of Cormac McCarthy and his love of nature to that of Henry Thoreau: when Elverum published a lengthy online post about why he preferred not to sign autographs, it was reported in some quarters as news.

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Thu Mar 15 12:00:35 GMT 2018