Twin-Peaks-Black-Metal, Mount Eerie's New Native Genre
Album Review of Wind's Poem, by Mount Eerie [2011, Hyperdub]
You can imagine some heartless sonovabitch saying, “Who really needs another apostrophe to the fucking wind anyway?” Taken out of context, you might even find yourself nodding in the affirmative. You might say, “True.” And you might, for very good reasons, mean it. It seems like the days of full-on nature worship are as passed as planeteers or pogs, and, vegan as everybody is, the dirty-fingernail thing just isn't it anymore. What wisdom could the wind hold today? Its howling is practically a creation of tall buildings and narrow streets.
Well my ennuied urbanites, take a listen to 2009's Wind's Poem for a more elemental interpretation. Two years ago it was called Phil Elverum's “black metal” record, and while that appellation seems a little silly now, the record itself is the purest kind of gold, fresh dug from the leeward earth of Mount Eerie, polished in the care of time, but still very, very dirty. No, it's still beautiful, soaring. Like an eagle, like the wind.
If there's black metal in it (and there definitely is), it's in the grandeur and the haunting of the guitars. It still has that autodidact's precocity you find in every record in the Microphones/Mount Eerie catalogue, but that precocity has dug in deeper than ever before, and in the earth under the hill of its digging, Phil Elverum has carved out a kitchenette and one guest bedroom and a wall for his vinyls, and maybe a place for the cat to nap. It's not only a world he's built in the earth, a shrine to the wind, but a home. On Wind's Poem, he burrows deeper into the particular shelter he's been curating since the earliest part of this century.
You'd never confuse this for Wolves in the Throne Room's Black Cascade. Even if every other track or so is packed loud with squalling guitars and pulsing drums, it's just not the same. You can hear an inspiration, an appropriation almost, of black metal. Elverum takes the textures, the tones, the drive, and tames it to his own harmonic mode. Even on the most metal of tracks, though, Elverum's vocal delivery is perfectly human. He never careens into goblin voice, nor does he affect a dwarven brogue. He's as elfish as ever, as gentle a persona as you'd find on Dawn, or the Glow, Pt. 2.
The sonic textures, rather than being the sound of hell or the wrath of a wrecked planet, form a sort of new Pacific Northwestern mythology in which history is buried beneath the geography, just prior to the advent of its most recent, rootless peoples. In fitting counterpoint, the violence of nature, the violence of the past, is balanced by the warm, almost new-agey, synth-tones of home. This is a foundational music for the youngest western cities. It has broad, epic, loud intentions, and, while its earnestness might force you to listen alone, listen you must.
More importantly, Wind's Poem is planet Earth's second-ever contribution to the Twin-Peaks theme-music genre. About fucking time. In the interim between almost-black-metal explosions, Wind's Poem shuffles to a Lynchian prom-night two step. With metaphysics and metaphors intact, these extended organ ballads evoke a separate, equally isolated, equally powerful, side of the PNW. Far from the train wreck these two styles would seem to demand, the tag-team is balanced. On the one hand, you are blistered by the black metal wind, on the other, succored in the cave Elverum's built for you. There he is smiling. He is wise. Outside, the wind lays low the intentions of man, but, in here, the kettle's on.
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Video & Audio of Wind's Poem by Mount Eerie