Mount Eerie: "Stone's Ode"

Bound to be overwhelmed by his concepts—as he likes to be; as he very well may hate himself—Phil Elverum’s returned from the fringe of the forest where he supposedly spent the past two years siphoning music from Washington wind and writing a third Mount Eerie album. As could be expected, Wind’s Poem is consumed with noise and tsotchke, a dissolving hybrid of the delay pedal dependency that allowed Black Wooden Ceiling Opening (2008) to be called, um, metal and the canned casio ambience that seemed to fill the songwriter’s EP output for some time after No Flashlight (2005). It’s also, when unoccupied by shorting a dreamy reverence with some reiterated squall, very pretty; when he quits marginalizing artistic growth so that all it encompasses is going from preternaturally tender to blandly loud, it’s healthy to drop the cynicism and be reminded Elverum’s still got that awe in him.

“Stone’s Ode” thankfully closes the album on a less than opaque breath. Synths weep, we swoon, the drum kit is nothing but hi-hat and a vat of chocolate milk; halfway through a marimba, or what I inevitably call that staccato bamboo chill, crawls in and Elverum’s vocals blur, less concerned with making it to a viable image than a “mountain” or an “overwhelming feeling.” I swear I hear a trumpet—a duck fart. When the double-LP expensive gatefold super-poster arrives heavily in the mail, I’ll know—Elverum will teach me what everything on this new album means. Until then, let’s revel in some of his fleeting romance while he’s not looking.