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Mount Eerie: Wind’s Poem [Album Review]

Mount Eerie

I recently began reading Dawn by Phil Elverum, a masterfully printed book accompanied by a CD that delves into his time spent and psyche during an extended winter stay in the barren northern region of Norway. And while Dawn finds Elverum giving a slight nod to the beats and Kerouak, his new one under the guise of Mount Eerie, Wind’s Poem, leans more toward David Lynch. It also finds Elverum straying from the soft guitar poetry that has dominated the more recent work produced in the Mount Eerie name.

The Lynchian elements are most blatant in “Between Two Mysteries”, which begins with the tempo-boosted theme notes of Twin Peaks and even drops the “Twin Peaks” name in the lyrics. While there’s an underlying theme to David Lynch’s television masterpiece throughout Wind’s Poem, the additional references are a bit more subtle.

“Wind’s Dark Poem” opens the album with noisy guitars and wild percussion — more common in Elverum’s prior moniker, Microphones. Likewise, epic eleven-and-a-half minute second track “Through The Trees” has a drawn-out Microphones-esque minimal drone. Still, Wind’s Poem maintains Mount Eerie’s soft, mopey vocals despite the instrumental shift that teeters between noise, minimalist drone, and the more familiar man-and-guitar acoustics.

Wind’s Poems is a highly melodic album, as instrumentation includes much more than just a guitar as found in Dawn and (to a slightly lesser extent due to accompanying artists) Lost Wisdom. “Wind Speaks” features lovely keyboards and leads into the drone-ridden “Summons” before launching into the more noise-ridden “Mouth Of Sky”.

While Microphones may be Elverum’s bread and butter, Mount Eerie is a project quickly eroding the gap between the well known and the slightly lesser known; Wind’s Poem merely furthers Mount Eerie’s already astounding place in independent music and proves that Elverum is nowhere near finished when it comes to producing some of the most honest, refreshing and amazing music in the world today.

Wind’s Poem is out now in the states on P.W. Elverum & Sun and in Europe through Tomlab. The Tomlab version comes with three bonus out-takes, including an alternate version of the much-loved “Lost Wisdom”, which takes the softly romantic tunes from its minimal beginnings and adds explosive noisy guitar.

Wind's Poem by Mount Eerie

[CD, 2009]

1. Wind’s Dark Poem
2. Through The Trees
3. My Heart Is Not At Peace
4. The Hidden Stone
5. Wind Speaks
6. Summons
7. Mouth Of Sky
8. Between Two Mysteries
9. Ancient Questions
10. (something)
11. Lost Wisdom (Part 2)
12. Stone’s Ode

Tomlab Extras
13. Lost Wisdom
14. Summons (Acoustic)
15. (wind lyrics)

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