A Crow Looked At Me (2017) - Mount Eerie

Imagine, if you will, that you have a soul. A tangible soul that you can actually touch, full of tenderness and joy and sweet delicious sorrow...all of 'the feels' as the kids today say. Now imagine having that soul pulled out of your body and inviting a gang of football hooligans to stamp on it for 41 minutes and 34 seconds. That is the experience of listening to Mount Eerie's 'A Crow Looked At Me'. 

There have been several albums made about death, particularly around the mid-to-late 2010's - David Bowie's 'Blackstar' (2015), Nick Cave's 'Skeleton Tree' (2016) and 'Carrie & Lowell' by Sufjan Stevens (2015) being standouts among the genre - but none of those efforts, or indeed any album in the history of music, tackled the subject in the utterly unflinching way shown here. It is completely unyielding in it's grief, and although it is by no means an easy or even a pleasant listen, it is an essential one.  

To clarify, this shouldn't be considered a Mount Eerie album at all. It is instead a solo project by frontman Phil Elverum that contains a lo-fi collection of 11 songs all dealing with the tragic loss of his then-wife, Genevieve Castree, and it is about as heart-wrenching an experience as you can get. To begin with a song like 'Real Death' - written only days after her passing - really sets the stall out and lets us, the listener, know that Phil is very upset and is not attempting to hide it in any way shape or form. Be warned, 'Club Tropicana' this is not.

Music, it has been said, is created for a variety of reasons - to make you dance, to make you sing-along, to make you feel-good in some way, to make you think in some way. This album does none of these things. This is an exercise in personal catharsis - a man struggling to deal with the premature loss of someone very special to him and deciding to simply pour it all out into a microphone - which results in a sort of half-spoken, half-sung stream-of-consciousness experience that is deeply personal, highly emotionally charged and incredibly difficult to listen to. 

Musically, as you might expect, everything is hushed guitars and quiet accompaniments, Elverum's voice barely above a whisper a lot of the time, but lyrically is where the most staggering action happens. There is no attempt to be clever or witty or allegorical, or even to make words rhyme. It just pours out, take it or leave it. This excerpt from track number 2 'Seaweed' just about sums it up: 

"Our daughter is one and a half. You have been dead 11 days.

I got on the boat and came to the place where we were going to build our house if you lived.

You died though, and I'm here alone with our baby and the dust of your bones"

Absolutely devastating.

However, as with some of the most challenging art, there is beauty to be found in all of the sadness. You sit there in a state of haunted, somewhat abject, horror as someone so earnestly bares their soul into your ears. Yet you find yourself suddenly steeped in admiration for the man for even attempting such a feat. While it is true that there is not much here that would ever make Radio 1's big hits list and most of it barely qualifies as music at all in the traditional sense, my god does it hit home. It is a staggeringly beautiful tribute not only to his now-passed wife, but to grief itself. In the pit of despair, when all hope is seemingly lost, there is no glory to be found, no funny quips to get us out of it, everything feels dull, lifeless, devoid of joy and it's one of those facts of life that you simply cannot avoid - the only way out is through. Not many people are brave enough to take that subject on, but here the feeling is captured in a truly magnificent way. 

You might be wondering why on earth you would willingly put yourself through such an experience when you could just as easily listen to the new Sabrina Carpenter album. It's hard to argue against that. But, for us humans, sometimes it's good to stop, reflect, and feel something that we might not in our everyday lives. After all, isn't that the point? Granted, it is difficult to recommend this album in the same way it's difficult to recommend something like 'Schindler's List' (1993) or Michael Haneke's 'Amour' (2012) - they are simply too heavy for anyone to be like "It's Sunday night, the kids are in bed, shall we whack on a bit of Schindler's List?". Not all art is supposed to be easy though. Some of it reflects the darkest aspects of humanity and, it could be argued, is essential for us to experience the full spectrum of life. 

Phil Elverum sings the words "When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb" on this album but, ironically, he has created something about as poetic as it gets. It is a masterpiece of raw, brutal, honesty that transports you into his now-empty house somewhere in the wilderness of Washington State where you sit with him as a sort of voyeur to someone else's absolute agony. It's not what a lot of us signed up for when choosing 'music' as an interest, but it is a towering achievement - albeit a very quiet one - nonetheless. An album whose brilliance you cannot ignore, and one that you might not want to ever listen to again. 

★★★★★

JB.