Mount Eerie - Black Wooden Ceiling Opening

(sample track: don't smoke)

(713/1000)

"is it because / there's a little part of you / that wants to be dead?"

I am confident that no matter how big of a Phil Elverum fan you are (or more likely, aren't), you aren't hoping that his next release will be a continuation of the aimless and dull noodling that has made up the majority of the Mount Eerie catalog. Even if you're the kind of person that does get hot and bothered over these releases, I'm sure you were ten times giddier over the (shocking) return of The Microphones with 2007's Don't Smoke / Get off the internet 7". That's because, let's face it, while Mount Eerie has been an interesting project, everyone liked The Microphones a lot more.

Why though? Because The Microphones had something that Mount Eerie doesn't, and I'm not talking about screeching feedback, tape loops, or the sounds of tugboats. The Microphones showcased someone who was in love with the process of creating music: Phil's excitement was apparent on every beat of even the downer songs on The Glow, Part 2 (which, if you don't have, please drop everything and obtain it immediately). In contrast, Phil seldom sounds like he's enjoying himself on most Mount Eerie releases; sometimes it sounds like he doesn't even care about the songs, and this apathy has made his music a lot less fun to listen to.

So when I say that the latest Mount Eerie release is a return to The Microphones form for Phil Elverum, I don't want anyone thinking that Black Wooden Ceiling Opening is going to be The Glow, Part 3 we've been waiting for forever because it is not. Those of you longing to be swept away on a magical wind into the woods by Phil's whispering voice wrapped in layer upon layer of sonic bliss will have to keep waiting, because Black Wooden Ceiling Opening is, in fact, relatively straight forward in its production. Vocals, guitars, drums, bass: the whole thing could easily have been recorded on a 4-track in a garage, and maybe it was. Many of the tracks indeed sound like something a high-school garage band might have recorded, like "Domesticated Dog" with its screechy vocals, off-beat drum fills, and "I turned all the knobs on my amp to 10" guitars on the chorus. But if you've ever been in a garage band during high school, you know how much satisfaction there is to be had with each misplaced chord or feeble harmonization attempt. The point was to think your pick-slide-during-epic-drum-fill-into-pulsing-hardcore-chorus was kick ass, even when it wasn't really that kick ass. If you were enjoying yourself, then so were your five friends who came to see your show...

And so by letting go of pretension and just going balls out, Mount Eerie comes through with an EP which for the first time in a long while sounds like Phil is having a blast making music, and its in this sense that this EP feels the most like The Microphones of anything he's released in a long time. Not surprisingly, then, I'm actually having fun listening to it. Is it an amazing album? Definitely not. To be honest I'm not even sure that it's really particularly good ("This is awful" -- Sylvia). But in the heavier and less formal setting of Black Wooden Ceiling Opening, Phil has finally liberated himself from, well, himself, and in the process has created an engaging album in which his sense of composition and arrangement are bullied, but not trumped, by these new garage-rock aspirations.

Buy it from Insound