#751 Mount Eerie - Clear Moon

As a Microphones / Mount Eerie album, this album sucks, a meandering, listless series of droning, moaning half-remembered dreams, punctuated by muddled, thunderous drums.

It sounds like No Flashlight with less heart, like The Microphones' Mount Eerie with less awe-inpsiring scale, like The Glow Pt. 2 with less effective pathos and vulnerability. As arty indie rock, it is empty, aimless and dull.

But is this just something else? After all, two of my comparisons are to the band's prior incarnation as The Microphones, maybe they deserve a rebirth. If you listen to it with fresh ears, this isn't indie rock at all any more, but possibly guitar-laced ambient. Ambient so spare that Richard James circa 85-92 would ask where the beat was, with drones so long and foreboding Angelo Badalamenti would get restless.

Even seeing it from that angle, its hard to call this a success, with the beats only occasionally skittering eccentric, the drones only occasionally glimpsing transcendence, and the vocals sounding decidedly out of place.

One last try. As a grasp at capturing existential emptiness, terror and longing, a repeated theme for Phil Elvrum, this is more successful. It is relentless, uncomforting, seemingly endless, nightmarishly cold, utterly disinterested in your experience, much like the universe itself. In that sense, its a success, perhaps the boldest realization of Elvrum's aspirations. But still, once again, I can't call this a success. Previous albums managed to reel you out to the same themes with lifelines of melody and soul and song, an achievement more difficult and more rewarding than the crushing sound of oblivion itself, unfettered and untethered.

Unsuccessful. Verdict rendered.

Going for it full on is something you can't help but respect, and it took hours of struggling with The Glow Pt. 2 before I appreciated it. So maybe there's hope. But for now this seems a striking, brave, ultimately unsuccessful record, thin and empty and endless as the desert, as the surface of the moon, as time itself 2.5/5