Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked At Me ALBUM REVIEW

Hi, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of the new Mount Eerie album, A Crow Looked at Me.

This is the latest full-length LP from singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and home producer extraordinaire, mister Phil Elverum, who has recorded tons of music, not only under the Mount Eerie label but also The Microphones at one point; he has been involvеd in other projects as well and I'm not gonna mincе words or waste time, I was not looking forward to reviewing this album.

And not just because it was going to be a tough review, but because it would most likely be an even tougher listen, and that is not due to some kind of artistic change or direction that I didn't care for on his last couple of records, or something like that. No, instead it had everything to do with what I knew what this album was going to be about.

I'm talking about the very recent death of Phil's wife Geneviève, an incredibly personal loss that was made very public when Phil and Geneviève sought out fan donations to help pay for cancer treatments last year, and after that GoFundMe had successfully surpassed its goal by thousands and thousands of dollars, the news came of her passing and that was incredibly heartbreaking. But that death, that traumatic event in Phil's life that was not my reality even though I felt bad for him, I felt sad for him, I had donated to the GoFundMe page, my life went on as it did, Phil's was forever changed.

I didn't really know what to expect from Phil from there on out, what I definitely did not see coming was that in a very short amount of time he would have an album ready and also make it very clear what the album is about with the first teaser track from it, "Real Death".

I guess on the surface it shouldn't be that scary to review or listen to an album that seems to face death in a really personal or head-on way, there are plenty of records in the past that I've touched on that have done the same - David Bowie's Blackstar, Touché Amoré's Stage Four, or even the latest Sufjan Stevens record Carrie & Lowell, but I guess a few things make this Mount Eerie album really special, at least for me personally: I've been a fan of Phil's music for a long time, I interviewed him once, I've seen him live on numerous occasions, a lot of his music has a very personal place in my life, I own much of his discography...

I'm aware of how silly it is to feel like you know an artist because you listen to a ton of their music but, you know, I still can't help but feel that way at least a little. It does feel upsetting to know that he's been so deeply hurt by what he's singing about on this album, which he, you know, gives us every graphic detail of his pain and suffering and anguish, right down to the proximity of this death to him in terms of time, because there are numerous spots on this record where Phil says, you know, "It's been a few days since you passed away, it's been a few months since you passed away, it's been this many days and this many weeks since you passed away".

And you know what? If another thing about this album separates it from really any other record about death, about passing away, about mortality that I've ever heard, it's that you couldn't really argue that the albums in question weren't meant for entertainment. Entertainment is not a word that I would put onto this album at all. I've heard a couple of people trying to put the album down and critique it as not even being music, I don't know if I would sort of lob that critique at it. It's most certainly music, what I think this album is not is entertainment.

And while sometimes Phil does have a very nice, interesting, well-written, poetic turn of phrase on this album, there's not very much about what he's saying on the record that's metaphorical. There are songs on this record where he's literally reflecting on his wife dying and withering away in his arms or before his very eyes, he is taking out the trash in the bathroom months after she's passed away and it's full of "bloody, end-of-life tissues", as he puts it.

Albums of this emotional magnitude typically have a track or two that you get an emotional gut punch because you've been listening to the narrative, you're listening to the storyline, it's kind of building up to this really intense, emotional climax, and it's like "Man, you really built it up!" and then you just "AH!", just hit me with that really poignant or sobering statement on death. By contrast, every single track on A Crow Looked at Me is an emotional gut punch, in fact it's multiple gut punches within a gut punch. I think it's about as close as you can come using music to literally living through someone else's emotional trauma.

Now musically, this record is very stripped back, it's very slow, it's a very skeletal album, it's very acoustic a lot of the time. There are a whole lot of layers to speak of on these tracks and, you know, that's not to say that, you know, maybe this death sorted of pushed Phil in this direction to the super stark direction.

Not necessarily the case because this album reminds me of a record that had come out previously in Mount Eerie's discography, Dawn, a very underrated and underappreciated record in the Mount Eerie back catalogue, a record where Phil had holed up in some kind of remote Norwegian cabin for the winter and just kind of strung all these songs together, many of which were based on these very abstract poems. You could tell that the way the songs were constructed, the words very much came first and the music in this really linear but also repetitive fashion just works as a simple, skeletal, acoustic foundation for these words.

It's very much the same here: Phil is getting really poetic, he's kind of lyrically strolling his way through all of these very subtle, simple instrumentals. Now, by a comparison, A Crow Looked at Me is a little more dense, occasionally you do get an electric guitar, a drum machine, some bass or a piano. There are some overdubs but usually when another piece of instrumentation gets added in, it's so quiet.

And I will say one more thing about this Dawn comparison: on the second-last track here, "Soria Moria", Phil makes direct reference to being in that Norwegian cabin and leaving it with a letter from Geneviève, and the way he framed this it almost sounded like this is where their relationship either started or got really serious, and it's just... I don't know, for me as a fan, just really crazy that her death caused him to kind of go back to the sound either because her memory sort of pushed him there or her passing away is so isolating for him and so life-changing for him it's like the equivalent of being sort of in that lonely, desolate winter cabin.

I will say though, you know, musically I do think the instrumentals here are beautifully assembled, they're very gentle, like many Microphones and Mount Eerie releases, they have a very kind of rickety and very natural characteristic to them. I don't want to get too deep into the lyrics because God, they are hard to listen to, though I feel like I'll be doing this record in this review a disservice if I didn't at least try to talk about some of them.

Even when Phil is saying something that I think is really beutiful, really moving, it does feel intense, like this one moment where he's talking about spreading her ashes: "I brought a chair from home / I'm leaving it on the hill / Facing west and north / And I poured out your ashes on it / I guess so you can watch the sunset / But the truth is I don't think of that dust as you / You are the sunset". Now the pacing of this verse is much slower than I just said it so the way these words pour in, you can really think about and digest each line as he's moving through the track, as he's strumming his guitar. And the moment when he says "I don't think of that dust as you" is a really significant point on the record, because it just makes me think of why we think of this kind of cremation dust as people. You know, it seems like, you know, for people who we love, for people who we cherish, it's a really weird way to kind of consolidate them or boil them down into this thing that just doesn't really have all that significance in the grander scheme of things. You know, comparing someone more to a sunset or something like that seems so much more fitting for the people who we loved so much in our lives. And it's another moment on this record that really reminds me of that Dawn record, because Phil leaves the song off with this really strong, poetic phrase and a single kind of sour off chord that's kind of outside of the progession or feels like a weird change in the chord progession.

Also the case on the song "My Chasm" which also has a very abrupt ending where Phil finishes the song off with some of the most intense lines on the entire record: "The loss of my life is a chasm I take into town / And I don't wanna close it / Look at me / Death is real". Of course when he says that final line Phil kind of kicks himself out of the very even somewhat monotone vocal delivery that he delivers much of the album in. He kind of goes up a few pitches and cracks his voice to go "Death is real", which I don't think I need to explain, it's pretty heart-wrenching.

The way this album is written and performed, it sort of forces you to mourn with Phil through his strange but very understandable coping mechanisms through this really terrible time in his life, as he makes references to pictures of his wife or reflections on what could have been had she lived or a very sad moment on this record where his daughter is asking him if mommy is swimming now in some kind of imagined afterlife or talking about being unable to stop talking about her with other people, a moment where Phil asks himself blatantly "Do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?". At one point Phil mentions a counselor that he and his wife used to visit died two months after his wife had died. Out of context I would have assumed that this was just some kind of tasteless twist in the plot of some sort of dark comedy, but no, it's the insane and unfair reality that Phil is living on this record.

Now, being that this is a Mount Eerie album, of course there are going to be numerous references to nature throughout this thing. We have ravens and crows and trees and various plant life and dimension of a fly as well. All these things serve as symbols or just of background painting to set the mood of the situation or maybe even a memory trigger for something that had happened in the past. The song "Forest Fire" does this better than any song on the record in my opinion. A track where Phil directly compares this forest fire happening on the edge of town to the situation he's going through currently, saying that the forest fire is "a natural, cleansing devastion, burning the understory, erasing trails", making parallels between the devastation of death and the devastation of nature.

You know, I don't think I need to tell you that there is not a glimmer of hope, there is not a ray of sunshine on this entire album, at least in my opinion. And not that you can't learn from death or losses that are incredibly personal, but the thing is Phil wrote and recorded this album so near to this very tragic event that he hasn't even had the opportunity to work through all of it, to come to terms with it, to move through what I guess you might call the five stages of grief, because on this record he's still very much in the throes of depression, he's still very much in the throes of frustation with the situation that he's going through and there are many moments on this record where I kind of feel like he's dealing in denial too - not in denial of reality, he has clearly understood what has happened in his life, but there are moments where he still thinks she's there or at least it kind of feels like that, that feeling of loneliness hasn't quite set in and there are other spots on this album where he openly sort of rejects wanting to have anything to do with what he's going through right now, he doesn't want to learn from this, he doesn't want to understand this, he doesn't want to deal with this.

And, as the listener, I very much felt like that too, you know, which is part of why listening to this record is so hard. Now, if I were to analyze this album from a very cold and calculated perspective I think it succeeds by every metric that I usually judge other albums by in terms of it being cohesive and conceptual and well-written and interestingly mixed or produced, but I feel like simply coming on here and being excited and telling you guys "Hey, this a good album, this a great album!" is kind of like a lie, because there's nothing good or great about what this album is about - and just to add something here, that very much seems to be the takeaway that Phil wants audiences to have on this record, that he wants them to learn on this record, that death is not this thing that like on most albums and most art is not something to get triumph out of, get glory out of, treating simply as some kind of growing or learning experience. Phil is trying to reframe it as the dark, depressing, scary, isolating, life-ruining thing that it is and you're gonna feel that pain with them, if you decide to sit through this record. You will.

Maybe it would be easier if this was the first time I was ever listening to a Mount Eerie album or Phil's music or something. Or maybe it wouldn't be, I'm not entirely sure. All I know is that I can't get away from the feeling that when I put this album on, in some kind of weird way, whether I'm doing it intentionally or not, I'm kind of basking in his pain or something. And I get that Phil recorded and willingly released this album, you know, it's not like listening to this record is voyeuristic, I mean Phil is obviously telling his audience what he wants them, to know about this situation, what he wants them to know about his feelings, but again I have a hard time sort of listening to this record and the way I would any other album, because for me it does not qualify as entertainment in the way that 99% of the music I review on this channel does, because as I listen to this album I don't feel like I'm listening to an album, I don't feel like I'm enjoying music, I don't feel like I'm just kind of sitting here and indulging in some sort of artistic experience. I feel like I'm working through a really horrible thing that happened to somebody, you know, I don't listen to this album and again really enjoy at least in the traditional sense, what I'm hearing all I can think is I just want Phil to be okay, I just want him to be better, I just want him to be able to work through this, I just hope he's all right at the end of all this.

You know, I just listen to all of this and I don't want this album, I just don't want it, not because, you know, there wasn't anything good about the record artistically, it's because I just don't want what the album is about, I just don't want it to be real and maybe in that sense Phil succeeded with this record because that's very much sort of the perspective and the tone that he takes with the song "Real Death", which is not only probably his real feelings on the matter but also in a way a moment of atonement for him because Phil has had his fair share of songs in the past where he's singing about death, where he's singing about being in this void, where he' singing about mortality and you know, even though it was really dark in the past when he would reflect on these matters, now it feels even more grim, it feels even more real, because it is real this time and it's scary and that's all I really wanna say about the record. While the album I think is a very difficult and it is a very inaccessible listen and again if you do enjoy this, you will not enjoy this in the way that you normally enjoy other albums.

The fact that this record put me in a different emotional place for many other records, that in and of itself makes it an interesting listen, makes it a significant listen, makes it a really important album at least from my perspective. You know, that's one of the great things about art in my opinion, that it can kind of create these new mental avenues or it could push the envelope of experiences that you feel like you've had emotionally. That's one of the great things about art in my opinion, that it can kind of create these new avenues of emotion and thought, even if the direction those avenues go in aren't necessarily confortamble. If there are any spare critiques that I could throw at this record, I mean there are a few spots that maybe instrumentally are a little bland, are a little redundant and with the fact that Phil recorded and just put this record together so close to the moment of trauma that this album centers around, I feel like we don't get a full picture, Phil didn't really gave himself an opportunity to organize much of what has happened, process what has happened. It makes for a really intense listening experience, but I still feel like I come away from this record with less than a full understanding of everything that's gone on, everything that Phil is going through and how this experience is going to impact Phil's life going forward.

I'm feeling a decent to strong 9 on this album. Tran-

Sition. Have you given this album a listen? What do you think of it? Did it sort of hit you emotionally in the way that it did me? Let me know down in the comments, and there are sorts of links and videos next to my head that you should check out, I think. Subscribe to the channel, official website too. You're the best, I'll catch you guys in the next review. Stay strong, forever.