John Bemis
Blogs Editor
@bemiscourant
If the album titles Clear Moon, Ocean Roar, and Winds Poem were not enough of a clue, Phil Elverum is a student to the natural world. Nature, in it’s most pure and powerful state, is a world that Elverum has made his life mission to portray musically. Through The Microphones, and Mount Eerie, he expertly finds solitude within vast lo-fi atmospheres, remaining calm in the eye of the storm while occasionally venturing into its chaos. On Sauna, Mount Eerie’s 20th full-length release, Elverum exhibits a fresh musical palette, yet remains in his typical emotional location, giving a pleasant gesture of experimental folk that sacrifices topical originality for a shift in landscape.
Phil has a habit for front-loading his albums, and Sauna is no exception. Sauna’s 10-minute title track starts the record with a melting synthesizer drone. Small drops of acoustic guitar and wordless vocals ripple through the track’s liquid before Elverum details his meditative mid-winter state of mind. Again, it’s not the first time that the solitude of the winter months has been discussed on a Mount Eerie record. In the entire record, though, is a thaw of catharsis, uniquely juxtaposing his usual freezing temperament.
Dynamic contrast is a tool wielded on Sauna like rubber cement to looser structures. The cold-winded black metal of BOAT melts into the lumbering psychedelic dirge of PLANETS, which further slows into the folk-tinged PUMPKIN. This three-part decrescendo is a change of seasons, winter melting into spring and breathing in the fresh air. Moving through these phases, though, he seems more aware of his position than truly affected by it.
Stepping into the ‘sauna’ takes Mount Eerie into a new, yet mentally stagnant shape. Sanding the sharper edges and warming the blood is a step in a more musically organic direction, Elverum building another new world without stepping into it. Meditative zen through nature is a subject now explored through Mount Eerie ad nauseum that even this fresh environment cannot bring to life. If the album was able to express Elverum’s emotional polarity solely through it’s instrumentation, it could potentially justify his lyrical stoicism. Exploring these once-novel concepts prevents even his hesitant-yet-gusto vocal enigmatism from providing fresh content.
BOOKS is a beautiful staccato of plucked strings that shatters into a throbbing organ on THIS, a track surmising the albums unfortunate premise as Elverum sings “I return to this same spot in the river//in a spring thaw”. Sauna gives the impression that Mount Eerie is still ripe with ideas, yet ones that are fully content in exploring worn themes. Elverum has returned, again, to his comfort zone to watch the seasons change and deliver to us his observations, forgetting character movement as he finally allows the sun to shine in.
Rating: 5/10
