Review Summary: Words fail. Ratings fail.
When I was first reading the personal journal that Phil Elverum kept when he was living in an isolated cabin in Norway for three months, it felt like a perverse invasion of his privacy. Here was a man, on the brink of a significant life change, living by himself in a strange country hunting for food and cutting wood and writing in a journal all his deepest personal thoughts, his emotions, dreams. He detailed calls with his father, moments when he broke down in tears, he wrote of the dissolution of his long-term relationship, and the thoughts that ate him day by day in his solitude. Listening to the music that accompanied the journal,
Dawn, a series of acoustic and bare-bones folk songs that narrated the experience, felt wrong. But through it, I got to know Phil better than I had before. I smiled at his geeky drawings, his bad jokes and the way he seemingly acted only around himself. I felt closer to Phil, as a person. I’ve always felt drawn to his music. His lo-fi, DIY aesthetic always felt achievable. Relatable. In the
Dawn journal, he recounts a dream he had where he met Björk, and he wanted to engage with her person-to-person, not musician-to-fan. He wanted to erase that line, that line that made him come across as an adoring fan, just another faceless praising person in a sea of faceless praising persons. I’ve always believed that Phil intrinsically erases that line with his fans. His music, his social media presence, the way he promotes his music, plays his live shows, acts in his interviews, it’s all genuine. He’s an awkward, stumbling, thinking person just like me.
It’s a reaction within me to listen to his
Live In Copenhagen record whenever I’m feeling stressed out or anxious. He comes on stage and he says “hi, hello, hey” to the audience in his dull but comforting voice. He starts conversations, shares thoughts like he’s just another member of the crowd. He encourages fans to speak to him, “just don’t be afraid to ask.” Phil immediately puts himself on the listener’s level. He becomes a close friend, singing songs of his life, and he encourages us to sing along too. And we do. It’s an intimate, warm and fulfilling experience that gives me nothing but joy. Phil is a friend of mine. His wife, Geneviève, was a beautiful artist like him. She had contributed to many of Phil’s releases, as well as recording her own independent projects under the names Woelv and Ô Paon. Together, through the experiences they had brought me, I knew them. I felt inspired and frequently close to what they did, their lives. It’s perhaps misguided, silly and wrong of me to feel this. I’ve never met Phil. I’ve only experienced him through varying platforms, all of which are artificial and leave me disconnected. Phil does not know me. But I support him endlessly, I passionately admire his work, his ethic, his person. When he made the news of Geneviève’s illness public, I donated without hesitation and sent messages of good will and hope for them, and their newborn daughter.
When Phil announced
A Crow Looked At Me, my heart sank. He had already stated before this that during year of Geneviève’s illness, he couldn’t work. And then such a short time after her death, an album emerged. It had a name, a single. To think that this music must have just flowed out of him like a hot sweat. Phil’s heart has always been tied to melancholy, but would this album follow suit, or could it be a touching and triumphant ode to overcoming pain and adversity, filled with good memories and love, a positive take on his newly forged path as a struggling father? It felt unnatural even wanting to hear it. What good could come from putting his grief, his loss, on a pedestal? And where the *** would I get off considering this my loss as well, how could I possibly feel—no matter how close my heart is tied to Phil—how could I feel like I am even remotely deserving of being this invested in his loss? Did I feel excitement for a new Mount Eerie album, or was it dread?
A Crow Looked At Me should not exist. Death is real. This is the mantra that Phil recites to himself throughout the record to keep himself in check, when his mind wanders. For so long, death has acted as a metaphor, a character in the annals of Phil’s musical history. His ambiguous thoughts stood bold like icons of dense imagery and musings. But now he minces no words, every word on this album is a sad story, happy memory or angry pleading from Phil, adolescent and unwanting,
”But when I’m kneeling in the heat throwing out your underwear, the devastation is not natural or good. You do belong here. I reject nature. I disagree.”
It’s hard to find enjoyment in
A Crow Looked At Me, despite the fact that it contains what are undoubtedly some of Phil’s greatest musical refrains. Tracks like ‘Ravens’ and ‘Soria Moria’ are some of the most musically provocative and beautifully tense I’ve ever heard. The way they build is tense and unforgiving, unfolding and evolving with guitar work more technically deft and forward in its effectiveness than anything he’s done before. Most of the songs progress through solemn and soft acoustic layers. No reverb. Dense with easy words, as he tells it. The metronome ticks by dimly throughout the album. Piano keys roll in thick and powerful, and Phil sings in his warmly familiar croon that’s completely out of tune but completely perfect. But all this doesn’t help when the music is accompanied by such extreme weight. In a recent interview, he spoke of the difficulties he has with wanting to perform these songs live. The more he plays them live, the more numb he becomes to the content of these tracks, how wrong it feels to lose the ability to identify with tracks that came from such profound discomfort. And should we, as listeners, also lose the ability to identify and find emotional release through these songs over time? So much of me wants to put this album down forever, never hear it again. As much as it feels wrong to love the beauty and the life and death within these songs, it feels even worse to become numb to the situational context that it is so thickly drenched in. In the same stroke of thought, Phil also speaks of how singing these songs, to himself, brings him closer to her. Being present with her, and memories of her, “that feels really good actually.”
A Crow Looked At Me is conflicting. It’s painful, but it’s so overwhelmingly earnest and as it closes with the solemn love song to their daughter, a plain and unadorned acoustic composition. No reverb. Dense with easy words.
”Sweet kid, what is this world we’re giving you? Smoldering and fascist, with no mother.”
A Crow Looked At Me is a grim diary of experiencing death first hand in those early days, weeks and months. And much like I felt wrong all those years ago when reading the
Dawn journal, listening to the dated passages of this album feels worse. He will often open up a song with a stamp, like “it’s been two months”, or “it’s been eleven days” and it makes your heart stop. That humble, awkward man who sang with me on
Live In Copenhagen is a breaking shell here. I can’t feel close to him right now, and I hate that this needs to exist. I hate that it’s so completely wonderful and resonant as a record. I hate what it makes me feel, and I hate what it has made Phil feel. I hate that a daughter has to grow up without a mother. I hate that one of the most endearing and wonderful people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing had to go through this tragedy. And I hate that this album so strongly tears down my illusions. I don’t know Phil. He’s not my friend. And it’s not right for me to feel his pain like this. It’s not my place, I cannot relate. Death is real, but I’ve never known it. To me it’s still a vast and untamed metaphor that exists throughout Mount Eerie’s past. This album is not for me, but giving it to me is all Phil knows.
