Review Summary: Back to the world I go.
The first thing I noticed about Mount Eerie’s debut EP was, well, how
clean it all was. The ubiquitous fuzz that caked so many Microphones recordings seems to have evaporated here, for the most part at least. Phil Elverum’s voice still has that quietly soothing feel to it that made his previous albums feel so intimate, but here it floats above the instrumentation rather than being entrenched in it. The musicians surrounding him seem content to stay in the background at first glance, as gently strummed acoustic guitars and a quiet drum beat propel the opening track forward. They grow bolder as the songs progress, reaching their agitated peak on “November 23, 2003, 4:45 PM” as Phil mutters to himself about the end of his world amidst the building snarls of electric guitar.
Phil’s stories on these seven songs walk the narrow line between abstraction and melancholic reflection, like unhappy memories half-remembered. Several songs deal in the many facets of unrequited love, from desperation (“With My Hands Out”) to bitterness (“My Burning”), where he regretfully snaps, “
I wanted her so bad / As revenge for my burning I burned the whole world / And was warm for a little bit”. These feelings are never given any sense of resolution, and all Phil can really do is move on. When he finally does, his voice slowly becomes more and more timid, until it practically devolves into humming on the muted epilogue, “Cold Mountain Song #286”.
As he reinvented himself under his new name, Phil began to experiment in subtlety rather than the grandeur of some of his past work (The Microphones’ final album
Mount Eerie springs to mind). The songs here twist and wind themselves through a quiet forest, as Phil tries to wrestle with his emotions and his regrets. Fortunately, he left a path large enough to follow in.
