Mount Eerie: "Lost Wisdom"
Elverum's latest with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire is nearly perfect
Nov 13, 2008
"I got close enough to the river that I couldn't hear the trucks, but not close enough to stop the roaring of my mind," Phil Elverum sings on the eponymous opening track on his latest release as Mount Eerie. This telling opening line crystallizes many of the themes he has explored as an artist from The Microphones to the present. Elverum makes music that at times ignores the busy commercialized industrial world, as if trapped in a sort of time warp where Man, capital M necessary, is constantly trying to reconcile his place in big "N" Nature.
Elverum's music thematically and lyrically functions as a kind of safe house against the clang and clatter of the outside artificial world, reminding the listener of the terrible beauty of nature and the multileveled explorations of the mind at work; his modus operandi is often to approach nature in such a way as to create an escape from the noise and development that would destroy it, yet recognizing the futility of trying to attempt a similar escape from one's mind.
Voices and Swans: "So I Be Written in the Book of Love"
Lost Wisdom is an exercise in Elverum's now familiar process of outward gazing/inward reflecting music that ultimately rests on the philosophical axis of the fleeting fragility of nature and human life. "Voice In Headphones", the second cut on the album is a perfect pop love song concerned with the experience of listening to music; its a beautifully cut mirror framed with tarnished brass that's been leaned against the wall and reflects back into itself from the full length mirror on the opposite door.
At one point "Voice in Headphones" becomes a tribute to the melody and words of its' subject, Björk's "Undo" from 2001's flawless Vespertine. The song is just such a tribute as to bear a flourish and trace from its honorifics, a line from Björk's chorus, "Its not meant to be a strife/Its not meant to be a struggle uphill."
This line, in Elverum's hands becomes a sort of mantra, begging to be repeated in unison. Elverum articulates Bjork's words in such a frame as to transform the otherworldly original into a sort of prayer, words offered up to the indifferent heavens. By the end of the track, Elverum's reflections dance with Björk's words in a beautiful counter-singing of voices that ends all too quickly.
"You Swan, Go On" is brief and sweet like a love affair; a song as much about passion as it is about death. The song begins with the assertion of the goodness of life and concludes with the dismissive but poignant line, "Oh, so it's over? Oh, so we died?" before the "swan inside," assumably the soul or immortal detritus, departs at the end of things.
Flames and Knowledge : "Emptiness Prevails"
The same casual acceptance of death that pervades "You Swan, Go On" continues on standout track "Flaming House" where Julie Doiron haunts the background like an insistent but never angry ghost, with the refrain "Emptiness prevails."
In front of her, Elverum sings about the "house he walks home to" being in flames; the house in the song is both a life and a relationship, a symbol of the permanent things we try to erect in order to combat death and decay.
Yet try as we might, Elverum and Doiron sing, we do all things unable to escape the "wind revealing the dust that the body becomes." The song ends with destruction and a familiar shadow; its a Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazelwood duet that's been reading too much Sartre and Dogen.
Phil Elverum: Patron Saint of Empty Spaces
Lost Wisdom is a brief glimpse into a moment of serendipitous beauty and staggering darkness; it is a near perfect picture of an end and a lack. If we may say it is flawed, it is only imperfect in its brevity; one listens to the album and feels it rush by in less than a half hour, left longing for more.
Lost Wisdom is what happens when Elverum, Doiron and Squire record in a room for a brief period creating not just a great record but a frame out of wood, nails and gold leaf and fasten this frame around a pervasive sense of fear and loss.
Their frame is small, with tiny embellishments that resemble leaves and wings, serving to detract from the bleak pitch within its four corners; as a frame, it functions not to hide the darkness but to draw attention to it and present it in a proper context. If Lost Wisdom were to suggest one thing to its listeners it would be this: existential dread is in the eye of the beholder, looking at death the right way, it can be simply seen as so much beauty in nature.
Lost Wisdom is out now on P. W. Elverum and Sun Ltd.
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