#485 Mount Eerie - No Flashlight

I kind of forgot these guys existed: by the time the Microphones' Mount Eerie album came out I felt like the project had run its course, but I did like Wind's Poem, so let's see.

I wanted to like this. I'm able to forgive a great deal of Phil Elverum's indulgences, his empty spaces, his tuneless, plaintive voice, his creaky production. Heck, those are some of his strengths! But what I really like is the epic scope, the inventive structures, the adventurous moves. None of that is on display here: the album strives for hugeness in the personal, but just ends up insular. The album even includes a book explaining the album's multifaceted mythology: in the Microphones days the messages, however obscured, felt universal enough not to need instructions. Later an album of drums from the album, which the band thought "good enough to listen to by themselves" came out - this seems like a band that has sucked up into its own mind, lost its concept of its own strengths, and has just started publishing its notepads unedited. There's a lack of endeavor.

That old sense of adventure is lost too. While the Microphones took on all of the world at once in all its largest tiny details, this trip feels through bedrooms and backwoods, but those well tracked, with suburbs just out of sight on any side, the actual music flat and tuneless and spare, barely stirring from bed. It is an object instead of a landscape, a boulder in the woods instead of the mountains opening skyward.

Maybe once you've made an album more or less about the whole universe there is nowhere left to go but around the horn, back to small and personal. Luckily, there's no suspense. If I had heard this when it first came out, before hearing Wind's Poem, I would have been worried that the project wasn't capable of reaching anything resembling its previous incarnation's heights. This is a shadow of Elverum's Microphones work, but at least with a retrospective glimmer of hope 2/5

You might like this if: you are very thoroughly enamored of the Elverum scene. You don't mind going spare and small, letting songs breathe, and being at peace with the chance that there might be little more there than breath.