#448 Mount Eerie - Wind's Poem

I had long known that The Microphones died on Mount Eerie and were reincarnated as Mount Eerie, but I'd never really listened to any of their stuff. I think that for me the arc was complete, the elemental cycle ended with the album that bear's this new band's name.

Phil Elverum's output has always demanded a monumental degree of patience, and has been more effective at rewarding that patience than just about anyone around. Naming the new band after a mountain couldn't be more appropriate, his albums have historically been wild and unforgiving and exhausting, but exalt you with skybreaking views of the beyond at their conclusion. The Glow Pt. 2 was the original 'work' album for me. I struggled through it like it was War and Peace, not really quite enjoying it, but finding just enough to draw me back, bolstered, I confess, by Pitckfork naming it their album of the year. It was an obsession, and eventually it revealed its secrets. Mount Eerie was a once through dark room dedicated listen that I found crushing, powerful, and never relivable, like a great piece of filmed tragedy. So maybe it was that exhaustion that kept me away.

Now here I am though, and the basic pattern is repeated. Kind of. If Mount Eerie was an eternal churning grind ever against gravity, this is a valley of wonders. It is guarded by twin beasts that batter you into a pliable shape, such that the rest of the album can run roughshod over your broken body. The opener is as pummeling as anything the band has ever done (though no worse than, say, Samurai Sword) and Through the Trees is appropriately named, a largely aimless 11 minute wandering. But once you're through, what wonders there are to find. Could the album work without those first two trials? I don't think so. They're necessary to hypnotize you, to break you down, to get you into the crushing headspace that this album wields.

An aside, as I've been doing lately. I listened to those first few tracks absentmindedly, without looking at the track times, like a goddamn vinyl age caveman might have. If I had known what I was in for with that second track I might have balked. I wasn't even aware of the track breaks, the first 15 minutes washing over me as an aggressive, slightly boring, too-arty excursion that turned me against the album. But it also let me put my guard down, such that the good bits could infiltrate and ravage.

So what of these much-touted payoffs? Lost Ode's mournful tones and sub-bass throb are as affecting and beautiful as anything Elverum has done, at least until Stone's Ode, which features honest to god harmonies. There are songs that, in the Microphones tradition, exist outside of music, but rather than creaking along as primitive totem beasts, these songs shimmer krypton-cold, tapping pulsing vibrations not unlike those I lauded on the Youth Lagoon album. Stone's Ode, it echoes on and on, as infinite as its name implies, just listen to those bass notes that follow the songs last lines and harbinge its fade-out.

Between Two mysteries is another song that's perfectly gorgeous in its own right, but also taps the uneasy cavities of anyone who watched Twin Peaks. I recognized its surging keys as Badalamentesque immediately, and then sure enough, the song weaves lines about "two mysteries" and then even "twin peaks" outright. It's a perfect point of reference, as Wind's Poem mirror's the shows uneasy, stunning highs, its uneven, difficult stretches, and even the blurry spaces between them.

Is this better than The Glow Pt. 2? I don't think it can compete with the fury and frailty of that, the most tragically human of all albums, and as a "hear once before you die" album it doesn't even outdo Mount Eerie, but its the prettiest thing by Elverum I've heard yet, and around here beauty counts for just plenty 4.5/5

You might like this if: you have patience. You will be battered by noise, tested by labyrinthine soundscapes, twisted by sentiment, but better for it by the end if you're willing to listen