ALBUM REVIEW: Mount Eerie — Black Wooden (EP)
April 29th, 2010 • Album Review
Phil Elverum is an undisputed, but still relatively obscure master of the American underground. Elverum first made waves when he was still known as The Microphones, in the early 2000s; his 2001 album, The Glow Pt. 2 especially gained him a following for its unusual and varied sonic texture, its naturalism and its range of tape hiss and hum among softly strummed songs and whaling static and feedback. Elverum wondered at his solitary and unique position under the stars and among rocks and trees.
Elverum is a musician both interested in intense documentation and dissemination (e.g. Elverum’s own record label, P.W. Elverum & Sun, and his detailed liner notes, complete with clippings footnotes and illustrations) and his own privacy—he usually tours solo, and he sort of famously lived in solitude in arctic Norway in 2002-3. This concern between public and private selves, and between interiority and exteriority illustrates itself best on his muddled and brilliant 2005 album, No Flashlight.
But years on, Elverum, now in his early thirties, has progressed and matured in his production and lyricism without losing the austere, concerned and articulate poetry of his music.
Black Wooden is an installment of UK’s Southern Records’ “Latitudes” series, limited edition and artful works from diverse artists like Grails, Sir Richard Bishop and Ariel’s Pink Haunted Graffiti. The five-song EP reflects and closely follows Elverum’s recent full length, Wind’s Poem, a swirling mix of pseudo-Black Metal, keyboards and quiet meditation on mortality and impermanence. Itself an excellent record, Wind’s Poem is a bit daunting in its immensity.
Black Wooden seems to distill some of the themes explored, but makes them more immediately digestible; it’s just Elverum with an acoustic guitar. It’s inclusion of some of Mount Eerie’s unreleased but classic tracks will delight most fanatics. To the new listener the music might be similarly appealing; Elverum’s unaffected voice seems downright religious on songs like “Marriage” and “Mount Eerie Revealed”. Elverum’s attention to the outside world and his real seriousness as an artist is something lacking in a lot of modern independent music, which has major difficulties being serious, even for a second.
It is a bit of a purist/fan-centered record, so beginners might be better looking toward Mount Eerie’s other recent releases, Lost Wisdom or Dawn.
-Charles Thaxton