Year End Wrap Ups - Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked at Me

Albums about death are nothing new.  Albums about grief are nothing new.  Albums about loss are nothing new.  In the past few years especially, it seems there has been a steady stream of raw, grief-stricken records, whether it be the heartbreaking stories of Sun Kil Moon’s Benji or Sufjan Stevens grappling with the life and death of his mother on Carrie & Lowell.  However, nothing prepared me for Mount Eerie’s masterpiece A Crow Looked at Me, in which Phil Elverum works through the death of his wife (artist and musician Geneviève Castrée), which left him not only a man missing his partner, but also a single father to an infant daughter.  
Much of Phil Elverum’s work, both as Mount Eerie and with his previous project The Microphones, has been hard to easily compare to other music around it, frequently seeming to exist in its own world.  Even next to his previous work, however, A Crow Looked at Me exists in a world all its own, one entirely surrounded by grief.  Capturing the moment when you know someone is gone, but aren’t yet sure how the world works and continues without them, and so the only left to do is grasp for symbols that they may still be there in the cracks, in the wind, in the flowers.  “I can’t remember, were you into Canada Geese” asks Elverum, knowing there’s likely no meaning to the flock on the beach, but reaching for it nonetheless.  A backpack arrives for their daughter, purchased by Geneviève before her death, one last gift before moving on from life.  One last gasp of motherhood, one last dream for the future, but ultimately just one more piece of proof there is no going back.  As Elverum repeats throughout the album like a mantra, death is real.
The album at times reads like a diary, with times and dates delivered sometimes exactly, but usually relative to the date of Geneviève’s death, the way we all refocus our lives and timelines around the tragedy that strikes us. Eventually, Elverum worries people are getting tired of hearing him talking about his dead wife.  It’s this detail that seals the sense of all-encompassing grief, where not only can he feel nothing but grief, but also can’t imagine people see anything else in him either.  The fear of spreading your sadness, of being unable to enter a social situation without infecting everyone else with your grief, keeps you home.  The fear of being trapped alone in your home, with nothing do but wallow in your grief until it consumes you, forces you out.  There’s nowhere to go where it’s ok.  There’s no escape from death, even for those lucky enough to have lived.  
A year-and-a-half ago, my cousin Henry, the closest relative I have ever had and the nearest thing I will ever have to a brother, passed away.  I’ll never forget my mother’s scream when she heard the news, instantly crushed and brought to tears.  I’ll never forget the sense of numbness that came over me instead, not sad, just empty, as if a chunk of me had been ripped out and as such there was nothing left there to feel.  I remember looking for things to keep him around, the borrowed copy of Waking Life I hadn’t watched, the censored copy of T-Pain’s Thr33 Ringz I never returned, the voicemails on my phone I was too anxious to reply to.  If there was so much business left to attend to, he couldn’t have really left, could he?  But in the end, it wasn’t up to me, just as it wasn’t up to Elverum, or Geneviève, or you.  “Death is real. Someone’s there and then they’re not”.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hex Enduction Hour (1982)

Hex Enduction Hour is considered by some to be the definitive Fall album, the first album to contain the dual drummer set-up of Paul Hanley and Karl Burns that helped separate The Fall from any other band, and songs that are among the band's best and most distinctive. However, it also may be the worst album to use when introducing someone to the Fall, for many of the same reasons, as the band learned in 1984 when Motown Records, interested in signing the band, asked for an example of their back catalog and when given Hex stated "I see no commercial in this band whatsoever." The album open with a song filled with Fall trademarks, "The Classical", which explodes open with both drummers pounding a rhythm along with Steve Hanley's bass riff, and soon are joined by an abrasive, ugly guitar line. Finally are Mark E. Smith's not sung but yelled vocals, lacking not only any sense of melody but also rhythm, that would be enough to turn away almost any new list...
Read more

Fall in a Hole (1983)

Fall in a Hole is most likely the Fall's defining live record, both because it is the classic Hex Enduction Hour line-up that is performing, as well as its over two-hour running time (on the 2006 reissue at least). The song choice is fantastic, with the majority of tracks coming from the albums Hex Enduction Hour and Room to Live, their most recent album and the album they were about to record respectively (although Fall in a Hole was released after Room to Live, the show was recorded just over a month before Room to Live was released). One interesting fact about the album is that it was recorded and produced by renowned New Zealand singer-songwriter / stroke victim Chris Knox. Anyway, back to The Fall. The performances are ace, with the band playing at their best, sloppily brilliant on "The Man Whose Head Expanded" (when I tried to figure out what song this reminded me of, I realized it was in fact about half of Slanted and Enchanted ), like a tight cohesive unit on ...
Read more

Grotesque (After the Gramme) (1980)

Now this is The Fall! Grotesque (After the Gramme) is the first album featuring the full Riley, Scanlon, Hanley, and Hanley line-up that would remain through Room to Live (and without Riley through The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall) and define the Fall's classic sound in the first half of the eighties. This album features many of the band's trademarks fully intact for the first time, such as Mark E. Smith's ironic, sometimes confusing but almost great lyrics, delivered rambling and barely on beat, the cheesy keyboard presets that sit on the line between sincerity and parody, and the tight rhythm section of riff-delivering bass and guitar and perfectly on beat drums that someone manage to hold the band together. On top of finally developing the sound of The Fall, Grotesque also features some of Mark E. Smith's best songs, such as "New Face in Hell", which I can only imagine Stephen Malkmus listened to a dozen times before writing "Conduit ...
Read more