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August 25, 2005

Review: Mt. Eerie - No Flashlight

The more I think about it, the less inclined I am to write a full review of No Flashlight, Phil Elv(e)rum's follow-up to Mount Eerie, and his first full-length under the Mt. Eerie moniker. It's good, and I'll talk some about it, but more than anything, I like it because it helped me focus my thoughts on Elv(e)rum's discography as a whole. What I think I'll do, is expand on some of those thoughts, and then bring it back to how they relate to NF.

In all of Phil Elv(e)rum's recorded work to date, there is an overwhelming emphasis on introspection and brute phenomenology. Take for instance, these lines from the song "You'll Be in the Air" from The Glow, Part 2 which recreate the first-person feeling of flying:

But if you just moved your arms then you could tell / That you are in the air / You'd feel the yawning gulf grow wider / And you'd feel the dwindling fuel for your lungs / So your breaths would slow

Considering the force with which these minutiae are conveyed it's almost like Elv(e)rum has uncovered some kind of phenomenological lingua franca with which to express each and every experiential nuance.

For another example, take the simple phrase "the awful feeling of electric heat" from the same album's opener. It's so compellingly evocative that it borders on hypnotic suggestion. You don't just know what he's talking about it, you almost literally feel it.

What makes The Microphones records so extraordinary is the unity of purpose towards which each and every aspect of their construction seems directed. Not only does Elv(e)rum write lyrics that get to the core of what it's like to be an experiencing thing, every nuance of his production begs to be listened to on headphones. In so doing, the listener becomes the medium. This gives the sounds an immediacy that reinforces and is reinforced by the lyrical content.

Further, Elv(e)rum's insistence on using acoustic methods to get certain sounds (e.g. putting microphones in boxes to get the right kind of muffle) gives every note, thud, or drone the essence of having been made by a body. This creates a seamless continuum between the intent of the musician, the acoustics of production, the psychoacoustics of listener perception, and finally the listener's emotional/visceral response.

That's why the Microphones' rarities comp, Song Islands, was so psychically jarring. It wasn't just a collection of singles from various periods in the Elv(e)rum's discography. It was a cobbling toether of small parts from incommensurable wholes. Here's whay that doesn't work: for all of the reasons listed at length above, each and every Microphones album (and so far I do mean just The Microphones, and not Microphones/Mt. Eerie) is more than just a concept, it's a gestalt. To be sure, there are lyrical, musical, and sonic themes that go throughout the whole discography, but each album still exists in such a holistic aesthetic/psychological/sonic space that putting snippets from those eras right next to each other creates as much cognitive dissonance as reading a literary mash-up like, say, The Sound and the Fury and the Half-Blood Prince.

To bring all of this back to No Flashlight, I think that the strength and innovation of Elv(e)rum's pre-Mt. Eerie output only stands as an indictment of how just-OK NF is. The songs are good, by and large, and there are some exciting new rhythmic elements (my man Phil blames it on the bossa nova!). But the magic continuity just isn't there. Sure, the album's title and title track seem to fit in with the themes I've been describing, evoking as they do the idea of being in the dark and having to navigate by feel. And there's plenty of Elv(e)rum's oft-used melodic cutting & pasting which ties the album together (Which, to be sure, is a Very Good Thing. I don't think that there can be any real Microphones fan who doesn't salivate a little on hearing the familiar melody of "You'll Be in the Air"). Nonetheless, the songs still feel like discrete entities. The clean sounding production, and oddly metal guitar sounds (to name just a couple of examples) in part create a palpable disonnect between the act of the creation and the thing created.

If it had been made by someone else, No Flashlight could've been their magnum opus. As it happened, the guy who did make it had already amassed an ouvre that eclipses most of what anybody else is doing in terms of raw unfettered genius. The bar is monolithically high, and he just didn't clear it this time around.

It's possible that I've gone very far off the deep end here, but I don't think I have. It might well be that Elv(e)rum's abandonment of his Microphones handle in favor of calling himself Mt. Eerie signifies just this very break with the old body of work and with the old creative process. If so, then the thing to do is celebrate everything he's done so far, and wait for him to grow into the next phase of his creative life.

Posted by matt at August 25, 2005 10:22 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Kevin at August 26, 2005 11:28 AM

Posted by: matt at August 26, 2005 11:47 AM