The Pointlessness and Promise of Art After Death
A recent article at New Zealand’s The Spinoff compared Mount Eerie’s 2017 album, A Crow Looked at Me, to, among other things, the Holocaust poetry of Primo Levi. The headline called Mount Eerie “the saddest musician in the world,” leading Phil Elverum, who records as Mount Eerie, to tweet: “I guess I’m the saddest in the world? Yeah maybe.”
Elverum’s wife, the artist Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four months after the birth of their only child. She died about a year later, in July 2016. Elverum, a cult-beloved folk musician best known for his work under the name The Microphones, processed his grief in song, recording in the bedroom he and Castrée shared. The resulting album was unflinching and hyper-literal, hypnotic and lo-fi, and deeply hostile to clichés about death: “I don’t want to learn anything from this,” he sang. It ended up one of the landmark albums of 2017, featuring on a number of critics’ annual lists, including my own.
A year later, he is back with a sequel, , that delves further into loss but with a slightly expanded musical and thematic scope. Whether over atonal guitars or bright patches of country pop, he asks questions about how to carry on, and about the utility of art. The word is overused in record reviews, but Elverum’s intensity—the rawness of his
