Fidalgo Island is nestled near Vancouver Island, right on the border
between the U.S. and Canada. Accessed by the Juan de Fuca Straight,
it is part of the San Juan Islands, and is surrounded by scenic
sights: the Skagit River delta to the southeast, the Olympic
Peninsula in the southwest, the San Juan Archipelago and Vancouver
Island to the west, volcanic Mount Baker to the north, and the
Cascade Mountains stretching to the east. Although it's basically
glacial till, Fidalgo Island is still dominated by the peak of Mount
Erie, which erupts from the tiny isle to over 1200 feet, its summit
forever looming over the Island. To Microphones songsmith Phil
Elvrum, who grew up on Fidalgo, it's forever Mount Eerie, a shadowy,
looming peak that served/serves as a constant reminder of mortality
and one's inconsequential stature, its steep ascent from its
surrounds making the Mount look like a temple pointed at heaven, an
earth-made pyramid cast amidst the wind and the snow and the waves of
the northwestern wilds of North America. Mount Eerie is a
concept record about all of this. Not merely about a mountain, or a
journey up a mountain, but of trying to determine one's place within
the world by immersion in the immensity of its wilderness. Elvrum was
inspired to make an album of such grand, dramatic scope by opera and
Greek tragedy, no less; his narrative tale is a journey into all
creation itself. As the album's protagonist scales Mount Erie/Eerie's
peak, he comes face to face with the environment at essence, seeing
the earth and time/space as living being(s). With five long sections
marked — the Sun, Solar System, Universe, Mt. Eerie, Universe
— it's obvious Elvrum is no longer just making pop music.
Through membership in D+ and Old Time Relijun, and on five prior
Microphones longplayers, he's made enough
smart/funny/witty/melancholy indie-pop to earn pride of place in K
Recs lore. Maybe he even has a sense of humor about this, as, on this
record, Elvrum has Calvin Johnson play the part of the Universe
— comically symbolic coming from inside such an indie-pop
enclave. But this time, he's made a work of art, one that deserves to
be heard outside of musical ghettos. It's a wandering travelogue
that, musically, mixes freaked-out Taiko drumming with plaintive
guitar-strumming, distorted drums/bass with washed-out vocal
choruses, all laid liberally with sounds of the wilderness —
whale-calls, snowfalls, and, oh, the wind and the rain — that
help transport listeners into both the physical world of Mount Erie
and the mythological world of Mount Eerie. To call it a masterpiece
in a world in which a Wilco album gets called a masterpiece seems, to
me, like some sort of slander. This is art scaling mountainous
heights, and making the climb with it is not for the faint-hearted.
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