- When Mount Eerie’s mastermind Phil Elverum suffered the loss of his wife Geneviève in 2016 to pancreatic cancer, his music suddenly became the sparsest and most lyrically bare of his career.
Gone were the meditations on the cosmos or the experiments in black metal and ambient textures. In its place was last year’s A Crow Looked At Me. “Barely music”, its author called it, as he softly sang conversational lyrics about the mundaneness and terror associated with sickness and grief, over sparse acoustic arrangements so you could hear every word. It was not an easy listen, but it was certainly unforgettable, and its undeniable emotional power resulted in arguably his most celebrated record since The Microphones’ The Glow Pt. 2.
One year later, Elverum follows it up with Now Only, another exploration of loss and finds the wounds are just as raw, but at the same time, life goes on and is as ripe for observation as ever. As with the last album, the lyrics more resemble conversations and diary statements than conventional lyrics. From his bemusement at getting booked for rock festivals to “play death songs to a bunch of young people on drugs” to discovering fragments of his wife’s bones in the garden after sprinkling some of her ashes there, Elverum’s observations are about as matter-of-fact as rock lyrics get, stripped of any artifice or pop song structure. As he sang on A Crow Looked At Me, “When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb”.
As harrowing as all this may sound, the new record is far from unlistenable. His vocals, as ever, have a warm, familiar tone, even as his lyrics are at their darkest. And while many have stated that Geneviève’s death has removed all abstract concept from Mount Eerie’s universe, I find this is not entirely true. The very diary-like nature of the lyrics governs the music, with the result that the tunes themselves morph into ever-changing passages, more like conversations than rock songs. This results in a strangely dream-like atmosphere for the listener, even though the songs are about Elverum’s horrific real-life experiences.
It’s a profoundly moving album and one that ultimately makes one thankful for those loved ones in our lives, because life is patently unfair and what we take for granted today could be gone tomorrow. Phil Elverum knows this more than most, and expresses it better than just about anyone.
- Matt Thrower.