You’re nuts if you pass up a chance to see Microphones perform live. After all, they’re typically billed as Mount Eerie these days. Essentially, they’re the same band and the music they make is, for lack of a better term, eerily similar. For the final performance Department of Safety would ever have, Microphones were the obvious choice of performer to conclude it all.

Lo-fi as all hell, perfect for DoS’s garage-site venue, and playing what Phil Elverum dubbed as a set filled with (if my memory serves me well) “songs about death, ghosts and mourning.” I think he slipped in one about morning as well.

The set was primarily acoustic, never quite slipping into that epic electric noise guitar that made Wind’s Poem (Mount Eerie’s 2009 LP) a favorite from last year. Still, it couldn’t have been a better farewell to a long-time Anacortes landmark for the music fan.