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Upcoming Shows
Birds on a Wire
FRIDAY & SATURDAY, March 26 & 27
PULLMAN
$35 Adv./$45 Door
$25 Group Rate of 10
Shearwater
w/the Hospital Ships & Wye Oak
FRIDAY, Apr. 30 8PM
@ The BellTower
PULLMAN
$12 Adv./$15 Door
Roadside Graves
w/TBD
THURSDAY, Aug. 5
@ TBA -
Stereopathic on Hypem
Apr
8
One of my favorite albums from last year contained four songs that come in under two minutes a piece. Mount Eerie’s Lost Wisdom songs wasted no time. Appropriate for an album full of songs aware of mortality. Behind even the breakup songs lurks the specter of death and the unknown. The short songs know exactly what they’ve come to do and spend no time on pleasantries. Nothing against pleasantries, but there’s something greatly refreshing about a song that finds its single purpose and pounces at it.
The album closes on a two-minute song, “Grave Robbers.” It’s a little unfair to jump straight to this track, since the album holds it off while building up to it. Love and death show up in every song, but this one treats the latter with an address straight to the listener. “Change your way of limping/ around the world./ ‘Cause you know what will come soon?/ A real broken leg.” Because time is short you had better not mope through it. You thought life gave you something to cry about? What about being dead?
The song progresses, a male/female duet accompanied by an acoustic guitar. The lyrics state the truth that death comes, inevitable for everyone. Phil Elverum (who is Mount Eerie, and used to be The Microphones) returns to images of ghosts stuck where they are. The “Grave Robbers” title recalls the idea that we, as matter, all recycle each other, reuse the stuff that once made the dead. Even though it’s honest, it’s morbid. Nothing so far justifies the song, or justifies my singling it out here. Though evocative and well-stated, the bulk of the song sets up the turn at the end. “Our bones do blow away,” Elverum sings, “in pink light.” For “in pink light” Julie Doiron, the female vocal on the record, drops out, and leaves Elverum alone to sing just those three words. The song ends right there.
The last line doesn’t overcome the morbidity of the previous lines, but it does propose some tension with them. The sentiment as I read it becomes, “Death in this world is strange.” Though we die and become dust, this happens in a context that might sometimes be as saccharine, or as beautiful, as “pink light.” An album that concerns itself with the mystery of human life and death as much as this one does, rightly catches our attention with the sudden entrance of light in the end. Even though death is the way of things, inescapably the way of things, it still stands in contrast to so much of what we see around us in the world and in life. Death seems unnatural here.
Why is that?
Mount Eerie - Grave Robbers mp3
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