Mount Eerie – Clear Moon / Ocean Roar 2LP

Description

The two albums packaged as one double LP!

Clear Moon: “More so than many artists,Phil Elverum‘sMount Eeriealbums feel like chapters in a larger continuing work, andClear Moon— itself the first half of a two-album project released in 2012 — is no exception. While these songs are somewhat gentler than the evocative black metal assault ofElverum‘s previous album, the mightyWind’s Poem,Clear Moonfeels like it picks up immediately after that album dies down; it’s the calm after the storm. The connectedness ofElverum‘s music extends to the connectedness within his music as well: this time,Mount Eerieexplores “a living place,” meaning somewhere that people live and the life of that particular place in its own right. It’s a concept that unites the themesElverumhas explored since hisMicrophonesdays: the juxtaposition of big and small; decay and rebirth; the ordinary and the majestic; and permanence and impermanence. He sets up all of this and more in the epic opener “Through the Trees, Pt. 2,” where he wonders as he wanders, taking in everything from mountains to websites, “just to remind myself that I briefly live,” as the track rolls out like an unfurling landscape. Hints ofWind’s Poem‘s heaviness resurface from time to time, as on “The Place Lives,” butClear Moon‘s dominant motifs are insistently strummed acoustic guitars and digitally pristine synths, which evokeAngelo Badalamenti‘sTwin Peakssoundtrack on the cloud-gazing “The Place I Live” and imbue it with a hypnotic urgency. Indeed, many of the album’s highlights are its most reflective moments. “Lone Bell”‘s delicately churning guitars and surprising brass capture a “dissipating dreamworld” and reaffirm how giftedElverumis at making his words evoke his music and vice versa. Later, the gorgeous “Clear Moon” is even more hushed, with distant, tumbling drums and trembling synths and treated vocals conveying a mood of great, if mysterious, importance. As always, there is a fascinating mix of literal and abstract inMount Eerie‘s music: on “Over Dark Water,”ElverumpairsWind’s Poem-esquecrushing guitars with choral vocals (Clear Moonwasn’t recorded in a desanctified church for nothing), then follows the song with an interlude of chirping birds and synths doing their best impersonation of a church organ. Indeed,Clear Moonis one ofMount Eerie‘s more open-ended albums in a while, and even if its subtle musings aren’t quite as immediately stunning asWind’s Poem‘s brutal beauty was,Elverum‘s meditation on the fact that life goes on within you and without you is thoughtful and thorough in a way few other songwriters could manage.” -All Music Guide

Ocean Roar: “Ocean Roaris the second of two albums released by Mount Eerie in 2012.[2]Phil ElvrumdescribedOcean Roaras a “counterpoint to the soft synth walls and landscape pondering of Clear Moon, presenting the opposite of that albums clear glints of awareness: a total wall of blue-grey oceanic fog, a half remembered dream of a trip through dense old growth hills to the gnarly winter ocean, in the middle of the night, decades ago.”” -Wikipedia