Mount Eerie

Though his devotees unfalteringly oppose the notion, it's impossible to ignore the reality that Phil Elverum's material has lost much of its luminosity in his transition between The Microphones and Mount Eerie. The change lies in the fact that the singer used to write less and say more, creating art that's emotional undercurrents could be felt before their exact story was understood. Take, for example, The Microphones' seminal release The Glow Pt. 2 compared to Mount Eerie's most significant outing No Flashlight. The former is an enveloping reverie, an aural journey through the melancholy twilight, frigid darkness and warming dawn of human relationships. The latter is a tangled briar of wordy lessons that require an attempt at the Guinness Book Record for world's largest album insert to clumsily explicate. Though it's hard to fault a musician for wanting to communicate, Mount Eerie tends to push its meanings so heavily that they compromise the music itself. Instead of crafting lush worlds of sonic experimentation, Elverum now resides in a stale classroom with little but his guitar to support his didactic lessons; his music turning into a cerebral chore rather than a visceral pleasure.

As a collaboration with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire, Lost Wisdom offers an occasional remedy for contemporary Elverum's shortcomings. There are many times throughout the album where the simple presence of Julie's voice makes Elverum's songwriting more approachable. On "If We Knew..." and "Who," Julie's delicate lilt takes lead, adding an immediate and relatable allure to the songs' weighty musings. While these tracks are still merely passable compared to the highlights of Elverum's back catalogue, a few outings prove truly memorable. On "Voice In Headphones," Elverum coos with a lo-fi earnesty, while Doiron layers her voice into a choir, chanting an epiphany borrowed from Bjork lyrics, "It's not meant to be a strife, it's not meant to be a struggle uphill." The highlight track, "You Swan Go On," recalls The Microphones vibrant days with an endearingly warm singsong melody that adds an uncontrived poignancy to its vibrant imagery.

While the aforementioned track subtly relates volumes by pining on a relatable emotion, the title track struggles to reveal deep truths so hard that crumbles under its own weight. Many of its lines are heavy-handedly stuffed with imagery, resulting in a clumsy cadence that fails to buttress the message. Even more disappointing is the fact that much of the material is rehashed from earlier recordings with slight changes, a troubling habit the songwriter has come to rely on. "Flaming House" is based on "Let's Get Out Of The Romance"—a template already worn thin with countless reuses—while the new version of "With My Hands Out" feels like Doiron simply singing along to the original recording.

Considering that the album clocks in under half-an-hour, it's impossible to overlook its stale material and unfortunate missteps. Taking the highlights on their own, it's easy to see why Elverum has earned adoration, but it's painfully disappointing to hear these moments watered down by the album's overwrought or lazily recycled material. Though Elverum undoubtedly has plenty to teach us, hopefully he'll return to communicating beyond the lyric sheet and within his music again.

—Jay Watford
11.20.08

The searching, noisy-then-delicate music of Eric's Trip had a big impact on Phil Elverum's work in the Microphones and Mount Eerie, so this collaboration with Eric's Trip and Broken Girl singer Julie Doiron and guitarist Fred Squire is inspired, if only because it makes the connection between Elverum and Doiron's music even stronger. Though Lost Wisdom came together during some downtime for the three musicians, its simplicity and immediacy sound intimate instead of tossed off. This is the spare, somber, introspective side of Mount Eerie, with just the barest hints of Squire's guitar adorning Elverum and Doiron's voices. Doiron's singing, both with Eric's Trip and Broken Girl, has always been uniquely lovely and vulnerable, and Elverum uses her as perfectly as he has Mirah, the Blow's Khaela Maricich, and Woelv's Geneviève Castrée on other projects. He and Doiron sound completely natural yet haunting trading verses and harmonies on "Lost Wisdom" and "Grave Robbers" -- both of their voices, and the music that surrounds them, have a deceptively fragile urgency that barely rises above a whisper for most of the album. Even the album's loudest moment, "Voice in Headphones" (which, along with "What?," could pass for one of the bonus tracks on the deluxe version of the Microphones' The Glow, Pt. 2), still fits with the rest of Lost Wisdom's delicacy and directness. That simplicity applies to Elverum's songwriting as well; his imagery becomes more tangible with the years, getting to deeper truths about love, death, and rebirth without getting too tangled in words: it doesn't get much more direct than "You Swan Go On"'s "With your hand down my throat/You held on to my heart/And pumped the blood through." "If We Knew..." is a sweet song about aging, love, and marriage that doesn't sound sappy, while a warm glow turns into a destructive fire on "Flaming Home." Mount Eerie take many forms and sounds, showing how comfortable Elverum is with just a room and a guitar or a large cast of players performing his songs; Lost Wisdom is a small-scale gem that shows off his (and Doiron's) gifts to their finest. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide