MOUNT EERIE
PHIL ELVERUM'S CATHARSIS
Earlier this month, Phil Elverum released a new Mount Eerie album, Now Only. It follows last year’s A Crow Looked at Me, and is something of a sequel to it, thematically. Both records are made up of songs Elverum wrote and recorded in the aftermath of the passing of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2016 in the house she shared with Elverum and their then one-and-a-half-year-old daughter.
Created in the very room where Castrée died, using some of her own instruments, A Crow Looked at Me is an unflinching document of Elverum’s bereavement captured in small moments: the artist holding Castrée as her last breaths escape, finally throwing out his late wife’s toothbrush three months after she has gone, watching his now-motherless daughter sleep and wondering what fills her dreams.
In some ways, Now Only is more of the same, but with glimmers of light and hope piercing the fog of Elverum’s grief.
When he’s asked if the act of channelling the most difficult chapters of his life into his work has been cathartic, Elverum pauses to consider what the word catharsis means. According to Merriamwebster, it’s a purging of emotions, usually through art, but in Elverum’s view, it also entails some sort of violent upheaval. Reached at home in Anacortes, Washington, he offers the following story:
“After Geneviève died, I went on this really crazy trip about a month later, to Haida Gwaii, and I got really sick on the way. I rode the ferries up through the Inside Passage with my daughter, who was oneand-a-half. It was a really extreme trip. I got super sick with some kind of virus or food poisoning or something, so I was vomiting and diarrhea-ing everywhere, and I was incapacitated.
“I was out in this remote place, and it was so extreme—and Geneviève had just died, and I was weeping,” Elverum continues. “It was catharsis. I was like a human volcano, both physically and emotionally. And I knew when it was happening, like, ‘If I survive this, then I’ll be transformed, and some big steps toward healing will have taken place.’”
That journey informed the lyrics to “Seaweed” and “Ravens” from A Crow Looked at Me. The latter includes the lines “You had cancer and you were killed and I’m left living like this/crying on the logging roads with your ashes in a jar/thinking about the things I’ll tell you/when you get back from wherever it is that you’ve gone/but then I remember death is real.”
Those lyrics are devastating in their directness, and are emblematic of Elverum’s desire to avoid couching his experience in metaphor. As he sings on “Real Death”, “When real death enters the house/all poetry is dumb.”
Elverum cites Sun Kil Moon as an influence on this new attitude toward songwriting, in particular the 2014 LP Benji, on which Mark Kozelek takes a matter-of-fact approach to documenting the tragic ends of his uncle and cousin, among other ostensibly grim topics.
“I thought I was done with music,” Elverum reflects. “I didn’t understand how it could make sense to make art of any kind in the context of this death. But hearing that record, and a couple of other things—this one Gary Snyder poem [‘Go Now’] that’s also really plainspoken about death, and a few other things— that just sort of opened up this idea of ‘Oh, I’m allowed to just say things as they are. I don’t have to interpret or be wise or creative. I can just describe life.’ That was kind of a liberating idea, and that came from Benji, among other things.”
Just as Benji found its way onto many a music critic’s year-end list in 2014, A Crow Looked at Me was pegged as one of last year’s best records by everyone from Pitchfork and NPR to Paste and Spin. As someone who has toiled proudly in the musical underground since the mid-1990s, Elverum was somewhat bemused by his suddenly heightened profile. Via Twitter, he wryly noted that the New York Times naming his album as one of 2017’s best resulted in six actual sales. It no doubt also increased his Spotify streaming numbers exponentially, which at least suggests that Mount Eerie’s music is reaching a wider audience, even if that audience isn’t ordering the records on vinyl.
“I know they’re listening,” Elverum says. “It would be nice to receive a living from it rather than mere attention. Yeah, the system is definitely broken, and streaming is definitely a major problem, but that’s a whole other conversation.”
It is indeed, and the conversation Elverum would rather have is one about legacy, both his own and that of his late wife, who was also a musician and a visual artist. It’s a theme he touches upon on Now Only’s penultimate track, “Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup”. The early-20thcentury Norwegian artist of the title died at 47, right after building a painting studio in his home, where, Elverum suggests, “he probably intended to keep on painting his resonant life into old age/ But sometimes people get killed before they get to finish/all the things they were going to do.”
Later in the same song, Elverum wonders “Does it even matter what we leave behind?”
“I think about it a lot, especially now that I’m surrounded by Geneviève’s things that she made, and trying to decide what means anything and what’s valuable,” he tells the Straight. “What is it all for? Why do we make stuff? And for a child that has to live in the aftermath of their parents, what do they need? How best can I make her unburdened, and yet equipped? It’s a hard question.”
Mount Eerie’s recent output suggests that Elverum is unafraid of asking hard questions, or of sharing the uncomfortable truths he discovers when he does. If A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only represent some sort of catharsis for him, here’s hoping he finds more of the same—but not necessarily of the visceral sort he found at Haida Gwaii. -
Mount Eerie plays the Vogue Theatre on Friday (March 30).
people who are with me in my life. So we’re going to get on with it.’”
In other words, Keep on Walking is mostly about perseverance—the kind of patience and stamina that lets a band maintain a 37-year career.
> ALEXANDER VARTY
54-40 plays the Abbotsford Arts Centre on Thursday (March 29).
If it hadn’t been for a man driving 2 a moving truck, Conor Rayne, one half of jazz- and hiphop–inspired duo Brasstracks, might never have made the choice to become a musician.
“I was about 10 or 11 maybe, and my family got a house in a different part of New Jersey,” he tells the Straight on the line from a Toronto tour stop. “One of the people helping lift the boxes saw my drum set, and he found out that I was an aspiring drummer. He gave my mom a bunch of jazz CDS. She started getting really into jazz, and so did my family, and then I started to pursue it after hearing those records. I really felt the freedom in the music. That’s what drew me into playing it.”
After winning a place at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music, he met Ivan Jackson—a fellow jazzschool student and trumpeter by trade. First playing as session musicians for various groups, the pair later decided to develop their own side project that would mix brass stabs with live drums and heavy synth lines, offering their own spin on future bass. To their surprise, it took off—but they weren’t fully satisfied with their output. Recently making the pivot into creating energetic jazz-infused hiphop, the duo was responsible for writing and producing Chance the Rapper’s Grammy-winning single “No Problem”, and locking down high-profile collaborations with Vancouver boy Pomo and superstar Anderson .Paak.
“Soundcloud is a huge future bass platform, and that was especially true when we first started,” says Rayne. “If you’re trying to make a name for yourself and get your music heard, and if your platform caters to future bass and electronic music, why not try to follow it? One thing we both learned early on is that it’s easier and better to build a fan base first, and then to stop compromising and start making the things you want to make. That was hip-hop for us.”
Proving they’re more than just hired guns, the launch of the pair’s 2017 EP For Those Who Know Part
> KATE WILSON
Brasstracks plays Fortune Sound Club on Friday (March 30).
The last time the Georgia Straight 2
spoke to New Zealand folk-pop phenomenon Marlon Williams, he had just about finished writing what would become his second album, Make Way for Love. And he readily admitted that he was nervous about stepping away from his habit of assuming a persona in each of his songs, rather than writing from the heart.
“I have so many singer-songwriter friends, and they pour their hearts out into this music, and that puts you in a certain place, psychologically, that I was always a little bit afraid of confronting,” he told us then, adding that his next release would be a biographical treatment of “some personal life changes” he’d been going through.
He’d recently experienced a painful breakup, he went on to say, and was feeling cautiously optimistic that “being left to try and make sense of it all.…through music” would have a positive result. Now that Make Way for Love has hit the streets, that optimism seems fully justifiable. The record describes the classic arc of infatuation, uncertainty, rejection, jealousy, depression, and reawakening that is one of the most basic human experiences, and while the subject matter is the stuff of cliché, Williams’s treatment of it is fresh. Whether it’s the murderous snark he sends a potential rival in “Party Boy” or the piano-ballad suicide note that is “Love Is a Terrible Thing”, Williams fully inhabits each tune, his vibrato-laden voice summoning up both classic pop balladeers like Roy Orbison or k.d. lang and the soaring Polynesian anthems of his Maori heritage.
But what does it feel like for Williams now that he’s venturing onto the concert stage without the benefit of the mask he used to wear? Reached at a Brooklyn, New York, tour stop, he says it feels good, and right, and not as nakedly vulnerable as he might have expected.
“As soon as I wrote those songs, those things became sort of superficial, in a way,” he explains. “Not in a bad way, but maybe that’s how I’m used to treating the characters in my songs. And there was something so cathartic about writing those songs that I gave up a bit of heaviness between them, or something. Now I feel comfortable doing them, despite the weight of the subject matter.”
Writing this more personal material was therapeutic, he adds, and proof of that extends beyond the record itself: he’s now in a happy relationship with his fellow Kiwi songwriter and Make Way for Love guest artist Aldous Harding—whose own songs suggest that she knows a thing or two about heartbreak. But will Williams be able to offer audiences the same kind of uplift he has experienced?
“I think so,” he says confidently. “I don’t see any reason why myself and the audience wouldn’t be looking for exactly the same kind of relief, when it comes to the tension that gets set in those songs. You know, there’s an obvious way through for everybody, so my relief is the audience’s relief. As long as I can find my own resolve in terms of what got me stuck in that spot in the first place, then it seems like a mutually beneficial interaction.”
> ALEXANDER VARTY
The Vancouver Folk Music Festival presents Marlon Williams at the Biltmore Cabaret on Thursday (March 29).
One of the most magical things 2
about art is the way it can be a tool with which to work through dark times. Liza Anne had plenty of those leading up to her brilliant and harrowingly honest third album, Fine but Dying.
“I had felt sick since I was a kid, like seven, but I always thought that it was normal,” the singer and guitarist says, speaking on her cellphone just outside Memphis. “To get sick after eating and constantly nauseous was something I normalized. When I was 19 I started touring really heavily. The more I was gone, the more I was eating food that was different and eating at all times of the day. I started to have intense fiery burning in all of my joints and intestines. It was constant and I felt completely outside of my body. I also had hormonal symptoms like panic attacks four or five times a day. Everything was derailing, so I knew that something was wrong.”
It should be noted that the artist born Elizabeth Anne Odachowski relates all this info in a manner that is anything but self-pitying, her enthusiasm for life palpable whether she’s talking about recording Fine but Dying in Paris, France, or the genius of Sylvia Plath.
She notes that she’s doing much better today. Part of that is due to her having traced her various medical challenges to an autoimmune deficiency. She has been able to get on top of things to the point where’s she’s stabilized. Her improved physical health has her out on the road again after she was sidelined for much of 2017.
But what might be going best right now for Anne is the reality that she’s responsible for one of the most powerful and essential albums of 2018.
As one might infer from its title, Fine but Dying is the kind of release you want to reach for when the blackness starts to creep in and you need to know you aren’t alone.
Anne has been there, a fact that bleeds through lines like “I think I wanna die, but I guess I know I’m fine” (from “Panic Attack”).
All this is set to indie pop at its most majestic, Anne breaking out the sugarswirled guitars on tracks like “Small Talks” and stomping the distortion pedal for the ferocious “Paranoia”.
During the recording process Anne was aware she was making something that had the potential to reach an audience well beyond that for her first two releases, The Colder Months (2014) and Two (2015).
The record is as beautiful as it is thought-provoking and statementmaking. Even when she’s at her most vulnerable, Anne’s message is that you have to be strong.
“I didn’t think that people would have gravitated towards the topics on their own,” she says. “Once I started working it out sonically and soundwise, that’s when I started to realize this had the opportunity to be heard like my previous albums didn’t. I figured I could sneak up on and manipulate people that wouldn’t normally experience a record about things like panic disorder and feminism.”
For those willing to take the journey, Anne’s greatest hope is that they’ll take away something that will get them through a rough patch.
“I wanted the album to have a duality—of darkness and light coexisting,” she says. “Yin and yang or sun and moon. The last year, I’ve spent so much time realizing those two sides exist every day. And that’s amazing, because when I wrote the album I don’t think I was totally aware of that. Every aspect of our lives has two sides, and we can literally choose to live in one or both of them at the same time. That’s been an interesting lesson.”
> MIKE USINGER
Liza Anne plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Saturday (March 31).