Artist: Mount Eerie
Label: P.W. Elverum & Sun, Ltd.
Release date: 2012
Length: 38:39
Rating: 4.5/5
Mount Eerie (aka Phil Elverum) is one of the most fiercely independent creators on today’s alternative/indie scene. Multi-instrumentalist, producer, sound engineer, photographer, painter, writer… and the list just keeps going. Before Phil took on the (solo) alias Mount Eerie, he breathed new life and creativity into the whole indie scene with his band The Microphones, a wonderfully idiosyncratic experimental »fuzz folk« project (his own term) that dropped the famous album The Glow Pt. 2 in 2001. Mount Eerie carries on the Microphones tradition, but in a somewhat different, more personal light. The solo project keeps the high dose of experimentation and folk, while swapping fuzz for noise and, interestingly, elements of black metal and drone. With the 2009 album Wind’s Poem, Mount Eerie laid the groundwork for a potential new (sub)genre of folk or black metal, a kind of mix of indie folk and black metal, drone folk metal, or whatever you want to call it. He continues this tradition of creative experimentation (which is at the same time incredibly soothing and melodic, especially thanks to Phil’s vocals) with a pair of albums from 2012 – Clear Moon (RockLine review HERE), the calmer record of the two, and its wicked twin Ocean Roar, where Mount Eerie pushes harder on his vision of blending indie folk and black metal, as he did more extensively on Wind’s Poem.
Put simply, then, Ocean Roar is exactly that – the wicked twin of Clear Moon. Even the album titles point to the contrast – Clear Moon describes a clear night, maybe a little melancholic, since Phil romanticizes his lyrical subjects (all of nature) a bit, while Ocean Roar is mighty, terrifying, and loud too; it shows nature in a different light. Genre-wise the two albums stand apart as well – Clear Moon tips the scales toward indie folk, while Ocean Roar tips them toward drone, noise, and black metal. Of course, that’s only a rough sketch – Ocean Roar is, in any case, a unique and self-contained album even entirely apart from Clear Moon.
The album shows its hand right away with the 10-minute opening epic »Pale Lights«, which offers everything this record stands for – a drone intro where a single, kind of anxious chord hovers somewhere in the air, then a loud explosion of drums, feedback, and similar noisy elements, dissonant and indistinct guitar riffs lurking somewhere in the background, all packed into countless layers piled on top of one another, creating a sound that’s full but also blurry, a little distorted, produced in the style of Kevin Shields. Against that comes Phil’s vocal, clean, dreamy, calm, always soothing and meditative. This contrast between the noise and his voice fuses the two into a sort of Siamese sonic mass, which, despite all the noise, then creates that incredible Zen feeling. »Pale Lights« thus represents the album as a whole, since it contains every element Elverum wants to present and refine with Ocean Roar. The production of these epic stretches of the songs evokes a church setting – anyone who gets that feeling is definitely not mistaken, since Phil’s recording space has been an old church for a good two years now, which gives him not only an amazing recording room and, as a result, amazing acoustics, but also the use of an organ, which certainly adds to his enormous wall of droning chords. The might of the ocean is captured incredibly well in this open church space, and its force is channeled into a gargantuan sound of fearsome, organ-like viscosity.
On Ocean Roar, the folky simplicity of Clear Moon is perhaps replaced by a desire for a more complex sound, for a bigger sonic mass, for massive orchestration. So even when the instruments aren’t exactly booming and echoing in every direction, Phil’s vocal is accompanied by a rather eerie female choir, sometimes with more dissonant, sometimes with ethereal, floating backing. The instrumental parts aren’t always an indistinct mass of countless noisy layers either – Phil Elverum always keeps a sense of strong melody, even if it can spread out into a seemingly indistinguishable tangle of arrangements. But despite the occasional Zen-soothing moment, Ocean Roar is first and foremost an album of anxious, dark, and terrifyingly melancholic music – »terrifyingly« because all Mount Eerie records are melancholic, but this one carries a very special connotation.
The lyrics fit accordingly – fewer personal, pretty philosophical questions and more visions of a cruel world, more pessimism, more general dark themes. Phil again touches on the natural world and our vulnerability, but from the angle that nature, with its omnipotence, can wipe us out at any moment.
2012 was definitely the year of Mount Eerie. Clear Moon and Ocean Roar are the perfect combination of two wonderful albums in such refined yet still distinct styles; a concept like this is truly hard to find in music. Two sides of nature, two sides of the same coin, light and dark, optimism and pessimism, quiet and loud… The albums are in stark contrast, yet inseparable – yin and yang. But Ocean Roar is also an incredible piece of work in its own right, one that transcends the indie scene because it’s simply too big to be boxed in.
Lineup
Phil Elverum – vocals, all instruments
Production
Phil Elverum
Tracklist
1. Pale Lights – 9:59
2. Ocean Roar – 2:47
3. Ancient Times – 1:11
4. Instrumental – 5:32
5. Waves – 4:57
6. Engel Der Luft (Popol Vuh) – 3:15
7. I walked Home Beholding – 4:05
8. Instrumental – 6:58
