Microphones mine a dreamy quarry
By BJ STREW
Scene Music Critic
On a campus homogenized in so many respects (Exhibit A: the pea coat), it is perhaps most dismally and most overtly so in the realm of music, causing many either to fall prey to acute angst or grow inured to the offal. But rest assured, there is an antidote for that angst. There is a light at the end of this long, dark, narrow tunnel: the independent record label.
In this case, the light— the white knight— is K Records, the Olympia, Washington outfit that dubbed their last Microphones release, The Glow Pt. 2, the "raison d'etre" of their entire universe. They were right; that album put K Records on the critics' map.
The follow-up, Mount Eerie, will keep it there. The loose and recently sundered collective helmed by Phil Elvrum, alias The Microphones, have trotted out a haunting, operatic tour de force. Oneiric, epic, optimistic and simple, the Elvrum Formula is anything but formulaic. Here the formula has wrought a stretch of allegorical splendor in five movements, which blur into each other so naturally and so poetically, borders between tracks blend like the edge of retreating tide. Mount Eerie is a true album — not a slapdash pentad of future-singles cobbled together in a shrink-wrapped jewel case.
Couched in the lush forest of western Washington state, the album's namesake, a minor Anacortes mount, loomed over Elvrum's house. This helps explain why, rounding out a four-part sequence, Mount Eerie concerns the element of earth; past "official" recordings dealt obliquely with air, water and fire. Elvrum explained that, aside from earth, space (q.v. the track listing) and "dying/being born" form the album's substance.
Mount Eerie reckons with the same human need as "The Waking," Theodore Roethke's villanelle: the need to fit ourselves into the cycle of life and the cold, impersonal natural order. How apt it is, then, to kick off with "The Sun," a lumbering 17-minute creation myth, with frenzied drumming cribbed from the soundtrack to Black Orpheus. Elvrum's also a "The Big Lebowski" fan, as close listening reveals.
The vocals don't roll up for 11 minutes, when Elvrum, in his trademark breathy tenor, begins his tale, surveying the exodus of everyone dear to him and the sighting of an ominous ship on the horizon. The tape hiss and foghorn help to place the drama for the listener, supplying the track with the air of neo-transcendentalist isolation that floods the album. Elvrum loves his Thoreau.
Sandwiched between two songs sharing the name "Universe," the first menacing and the second hopeful, the title track explores mortality, as Death, "a big black cloud," descends on Elvrum. A ghostly choir chants until feverish, distorted lyrics stamp it out, when the song brakes to detail the onset of scavenging vultures.
Less concept album than mythopoeic reverie, Mount Eerie is gorgeous and laden with drama and abstract wisdom. It is Elvrum's quarry, which he has mined not with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, but with nylon-stringed guitars, choirs, fuzzed bass and tsunamic blasts of white noise.
Elvrum's contempt for repetition is trumpeted here; he eschews pop's keystone, going not for stolid Clear Channel ditties, but an experience that's both poignant and cohesive. Run-of-the-mill Notre Dame listeners, the Linkin Park/Ludacris/Bob Marley/etc. fans, would likely find Mount Eerie either an insuperable mess or a bracing deviation from the usual potboiler dreck. But will they give it a chance?
Contact BJ Strew at strew.1@nd.edu
All Scene Stories for Tuesday, February 18, 2003
