Phil Elverum, the force behind the Microphones and Mount Eerie, lives in Anacortes, Wash., a small town of just under 20,000 people about 64 miles outside of Seattle. As he told Brandon Stosuy in last week's Pitchfork interview, he recently took an extended break from touring to record two albums there, and he speaks of it as a calming, recentering time: "The songs and the ideas came from a more slowed-down attention to this particular place, this town, walking from my house to the studio and back every day," Elverum told him. The second album of the pair, to be called Ocean Roar, will be out later this year; Elverum calls it "more challenging and weird and darker and heavier." For now, however, he has given us Clear Moon, an album that makes a vast, cool sanctuary of itself and quietly beckons you in. Inscrutable and transfixing, plainspoken and unknowable, it feels like a collection of secrets Elverum has cupped in his palm to pour directly, and privately, into your ear alone, a rich meditation on the many meanings of the word "home."
"I go on describing this place/ And the way it feels to live and die" is how Elverum summarizes his task on Clear Moon in the album's opening song, "Through the Trees, Pt. 2". The line also neatly serves as any great writer's ultimate mission statement: Your backyard is a gateway to the universe, if you look hard enough. Note the song title's tricky numerology: We seem to be joining Elverum in the middle of an ongoing, possibly endless cataloging task. (Elverum, of course, has a documented fondness for "Pt. 2's".) The song names all have the quality of bullet points in some strange thesis: "The Place Lives", the second song, is followed by "The Place I Live", and it feels like Elverum is using these phrases to draw some obscure distinctions that are very important to him. "If I look/ Or if I don't look/ Clouds are always passing over," he sings on "The Place I Live". It's a statement that can read as perversely comforting or profoundly depressing-- the universe doesn't disappear when I blink, on the one hand, and the universe wouldn't blink if I disappeared, on the other. Elverum's sighed inflection cradles both of these meanings with equal gentleness.
The album's sound, meanwhile has the misty-but-tactile feeling of a sense memory. Every sound echoes from side to side of the mix, and the effect isn't so much "panning" as it is a shimmering omnipresence. Acoustic guitars, light keyboards, muted but persistent drums-- the sounds on Clear Moon feel like anxious, living beings that are trying to whisper something to you that you don't want to know. "Lone Bell" is the moment where Elverum's existential quandaries suddenly sprout fangs and grow frightening: Sharp horn blats and insistently hammering guitars evoke fight-or-flight dread, danger, encroaching panic. The bassline keeps crawling up a modal minor scale in the center of the song, posing the same uneasy question, over and over.
What that question is remains deliciously out of verbal range, but Clear Moon's brought a sharp memory into relief for me: It reminded me of standing outside of my house as a child, on a cold night. From the street, the house, broadcasting its fragile comfort out to me, looked a little unreal: Elverum calls a song on the album "House Shape". You know you will be allowed back in, but you stand for a prolonged moment, looking into the lit windows, and tasting something uneasy in your mouth. Clear Moon summons, inhabits, and distends this moment for 42 consecutive minutes.
