Phil Elverum: “Am I out of tune?”
Audience: “No.”
Such was the only dialogue partaken between American singer-songwriter, better known as Mount Eerie, and the near-sold-out crowd in London’s EartH venue on this immensely sweaty summer’s night. Having garnered a considerable wave of recent critical reception and widespread sympathy courtesy of his last 2 heart-wrenching LPs, A Crow Looked At Me and Now Only, Elverum still proved himself an emphatic storyteller tonight for those eagerly patient listeners. Confiding in the crowd with purely new and unreleased material, Elverum splurged into an array of stories in the ensuing hour resulting in a reciprocal journey of emotions.
Standing alone, equipped with merely a guitar and his pictorial storytelling, Elverum delved into his first tangential track worth 15 minutes of the audience’s sympathetic ears. Reminiscent with that of Sun Kil Moon’s drawn-out and extensive songwriting, this particular songwriter incessantly skirted upon the edges of spoken word and gauzy singing. In conjunction with the intimate, theatrical spacing of Hackney’s venue, Elverum’s intense introspectiveness undeniably reverberated throughout this sweat-induced crowd revelling in pin-drop silence.
Whilst it may have proven hard to ascertain any of these recordings online for future reference, Elverum specifically called upon the audience to not film or record any of tonight’s yet-unreleased material as he deemed it “touchy”. Yet in spite of this review’s referential lack, this enigmatic songwriter was evidently still dealing with the ongoing trauma induced from his widowed life. Whilst his material has always proven “touchy” to varying degrees, Elverum has forever held such an alternative integrity within his work - now baring the seemingly several stages of a loved one’s death before our very own eyes.
Traversing through longer, winding tracks with shortened interludes peppered amongst it all, the audience were unorthodoxly led through the various corners of Mount Eerie’s mind - providing mere vignettes into such an immensely descriptive and vivid world. Capturing the storytelling elements of Sun Kil Moon, with the synonymous vocal fragility and delicacy of Aldous Harding and Adrianne Lenker, tonight’s musical character conglomerated into an enticingly different spectacle from anything I’ve seen recently.
Frankly, it’s a difficult task to conclude upon tonight’s entirely-new material without any reference within the online ether for this particular review. Yet the noticeable fallbacks of this set deemed memorable enough - from Eerie’s lack of vocal note accuracies, to the slightly shortened set time at 55 minutes, in which there was certainly room for more willed by this enamoured audience. Amongst it all, too, there was a palpably universal hope for some tracks of Eerie’s previous 2 LPs to be performed in some capacity tonight - alas, this went amiss. This latest material will certainly do for the time being, though, witnessing an especially intimate gig with one of modern folk’s most idiosyncratic songwriters.
7/10
Mount Eerie’s latest LP, Now Only, is out now and can be found here.
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