Review Summary: Dark and brooding, deep and emotionally penetrating, odd and brilliant Mount Eerie is a sentimentally-engaging 40-minute experience.
In the 2002 blockbuster “Catch Me If You Can”, Leonardo DiCaprio depicted Frank Abagnale, Jr., a chameleon-like con artist who took on several illustrious personas and used his criminal genius to gross millions of dollars in forged checks. His ability to juggle numerous personalities while avoiding detection by the FBI is the metaphorical equivocal to the musical balancing act of a certain Anacortes, Washington native. Phil Elvrum – the one man mastermind behind a handful of successful indie projects – has time and time again demonstrated his ability to make great music whilst micromanaging a couple projects and confusedly hopping from band name to band name. Throughout his career, he has developed numerous pseudonyms as if he were running from the law, and has interchanged surrounding band members like they were a dime a dozen. Combine the facts that he’s the only permanent member of The Microphones, and that he practically instills all the black, epic melancholy into 2003’s
Mount Eerie by himself, and it’s easy to see Elvrum as a one man show.
The Microphones’ sound here is pretty stripped down. Despite this, it seems the man – or rather, the ‘makeshift’ band – has evolved. From the upbeat melodies of
It Was Hot… to the diverse soundscapes of
The Glow Pt.2, it seems that this extremely dark album was just another step in Elvrum’s stairs. The album starts out with the ominous, seventeen minute “The Sun”, probably the most bare and exposed song of the entire album. It builds for ten minutes before Phil even sings, and when he finally does, it’s his lyrics that top off the blackness. Yes, there’s the shrill ringing, low pitched horns, and distorted synths, but it’s truly Elvrum’s lyrics that conjure dark imagery in our minds. He croons in anguish, “
See me run in terror for the mountain, see me scramble high, and see me burned and blind, and all hopeless and barren.”
And with its crawling, ghastly backdrop, “The Sun” presents melancholy
Mount Eerie’s message in true experimentalist fashion. It’s brilliant, but nothing else on the record quite matches its awesomeness.
As a whole, the stripped down, lo-fi nature is apparent, but not quite as obvious anywhere else compared to the first track. “Solar System” is merely a swaying, camp fire folk song, and here, it almost seems as if he’s drifting away from the subject matter and focus of the record. However, through the sweeping vocals and hazy atmosphere, this all reveals itself continually throughout both “Universe”s, but we never see the schizophrenic tendencies of “The Sun” (at least until the title track). Phil is a lyrical nomad who jumps to and from ideas, never quite settling on one. It’s maniacal really. It’s almost as if he’s trying to create an other-worldly album in the vein of Miles Davis’s
Bitch’s Brew. A vapid, drab, cold record that shows, if anything, that the disorganized songwriting of the album is really a plus. The sheer brilliance of
Mount Eerie stems from its fascinating obscurities and ingenious simplicity.
Elvrum’s singing, however, could possibly be the most important element of all of this chaos. His strained, yet calm tone is exactly the same as it was on previous records. He almost whispers his lyrics to the listener, giving his music a nice personal touch. However, throughout the album, his voice-related personality mixed with his depressing and sometimes downright bizarre lyrics paint a picture that seems all too real. On “The Sun”, he sings out, belting an out of pitch “scary trumpets” as squealing horns drive right in, as if his voice and his prediction of them carried them out. On just about every other track, he puts this to use too, and it really makes one think. In spite of that, he does experiment with his voice, sometimes getting more intensely into his music, and other times flavoring it with odd distortion. Either way, Phil Elvrum knows how to get to a listener, and does so in every way he can.
Dark and brooding, deep and emotionally penetrating, odd and brilliant
Mount Eerie is a sentimentally-engaging 40-minute experience. Elvrum would go on to spawn a new alias named after this album, and rightfully so. This album pieces all of its oddities together nicely, and is just another alterego of Phil Elvrum.
