When I heard Phil Elverum would be making a Mount Eerie album influenced by Scandinavian black metal, I worried. Black metal typically manifests as maudlin nihilism, and hasn’t drawn me in. While Wind’s Poem does contain some chaotic, heavy, distorted passages, it also goes subdued with tracks like this one, which closes the album. It also bears mentioning that Elverum has tended to punctuate with noise and distortion throughout his career, last year’s Lost Wisdom being a notable exception.

On “Stone’s Ode” the lyrics work with familiar Elverum themes. The stone is a solid thing which an unseen wind works to destroy. This fits into the existence vs. annihilation, ephemera of the body vs. the juggernaut of nature, sort of dichotomies Mount Eerie has always dealt in. To say the lyrics are heavy, weary, and obsessed with death is to say it’s a Mount Eerie song.

The music narrates the lyrics without straying into over-exposition. An ever-present synth line voices the wind, in the background and wearing away. When night falls, the key of the song shifts down and hangs on one chord as cymbals build. The song returns and moves to a quick end. Through this, the music manages to stay light, and becomes lighter as voices sing a wordless song, which we might assume is the wind. We know that for Elverum the wind is a destroyer, but the song indicates that at times it does slow, gentle work. The song plays with heaviness and lightness, which also happens from song to song on the rest of the album.

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MP3: Mount Eerie – “Stone’s Ode”

-Josh Stevenson lives and works in Moscow, ID.

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Edward first brought his son out a few weeks after the boy’s birth. He did not lay him on the rocks, but on the ground, where the boy dug heel into the ground and turned the soil. “Know the dust, because you go back to it,” he said to himself and the boy; but he smiled.

The place changed only slightly, over time. They sang against the rock face, whatever words and melodies came to them; some psalms, some about pissing against the rock wall.

Birds knew the place. They nested high and sang along. One morning they found a big cat, a young cougar, had fallen from the clifftop, face dashed on the rock pile. They cleaned him and kept the toothless skull perched in the wall. “It looks like a giant snake head,” the boy said. “Looks harmless,” Edward said.

The Microphones – I Want Wind to Blow mp3

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