Here Phil Elverum is again, two and a half years after we left him on Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, and he's still, essentially, in the same spot. As he put it on Clear Moon's "Through the Trees Pt. 2": "I go on describing this place, and the way it feels to live and die." The line was a clear mission statement, and the "go on" in this formulation seems as important as the "describing". On Sauna’s title track, he says he writes "to prove I don't exist/ To show that I am beyond this animal form and this lost mind." Existence, for Elverum, is conditional, not to be trusted, something that might disappear the second you take it for granted. Mount Eerie releases feel like an act of philosophical tax-paying, Elverum’s way of reasserting that he still exists, at least for a moment or two longer.
Like Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, Sauna is a careful cataloging of a single mind state. In some ways, it is an unacknowledged part three of that two-part series: hushed and patient, a processional of wispy, anxious sounds paired with Elverum’s calm, soothing voice. The album opens with a monumental whoosh of an organ, accompanied by crackling fire and the hiss of water hitting hot coals. The setting is pretty obvious, given the record’s title, but Elverum makes it explicit immediately: "I don’t think the world still exists/ Only this room in the snow, and the light from the coals." The song rolls on for 10 minutes, a luxurious stretch of drone rock as thick and murky as the lyrics are clear: "My life is a small fire I carry around," he sings, echoing, maybe, the "carrying the fire" line from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Elverum has never been artful or coy about his music: If you listen to a few minutes of one of his records, he will probably spell out for you exactly what he is exploring on them, and he will probably even tell you how he intends to do it. There is an admirable transparency to him, a sense that he has nothing to hide and would like for you to venture into the mysteriousness of his records armed with exactly as much information as he has. His lyrics are riddled with everyday actions: "I walked to the bookstore in the rain that silently filled the air/ All the lights were off or dim/ And there was nothing to do but walk to town and back," he sings on "Pumpkin". There is something almost aggressively quotidian about the scenarios he paints, like an indie film that aims to test your patience for how little action constitutes a "motion picture." Coffee is poured, windows are gazed at pensively, tractors idle.
As always, that mystery resides in the sounds he manipulates. No one else sounds like Phil Elverum. The amount of mood, texture, and feeling he can communicate with a single guitar drone is uncanny. His sounds feel soft and pliable, like they've had a portion of their middle frequencies carefully ladled out, yielding only boom at the bottom and wisp at the top. The only frequency in between is Elverum, his conversational voice sailing out of the murk like a paper airplane hitting your bedroom window. The arrangement serves as a neat metaphor for Elverum’s relationship to the world: His voice, small as it may be, is the only thing he can be sure of.
Musically, Sauna represents a thawing, the point when the icy chill of black metal, which has gripped Elverum for years, passes. Instead of snow imagery, we get rivers, and the blotted, heavy guitars and humid organ act out the thaw the lyrics describe. Piano and violins share a plucked major-key figure on "Books", which speckle the surface of the song like little orange and red paint daubs blobbed onto grey. Folky 12-string guitars ring out on "Pumpkin", a song on which Elverum clambers over damp rocks to observe a split-open pumpkin sitting on a river bed. The pumpkin, bright and fat, feels like a fertility symbol, and his fascination with it in the song stands in for the album’s preoccupations. On "Spring", the 13-minute climax of the record, the mood darkens, as the organ blasts out hair-raising dissonances and the thaw turns into a deluge: "Nothing is impermeable/ The basement’s flooded," he intones. Even in a season of rebirth and fertility, Elverum sees the possibility for oblivion.
Weather—specifically, crappy weather—has always been an inspiration for Elverum, something he discussed last July on the podcast Song Exploder. Deconstructing his beloved "I Want Wind to Blow", from the Microphones’ The Glow, Pt. 2, he called the weather "a metaphor for my emotions. That was kind of what all of my songs were about then and, arguably, still are." On Sauna, the weather has shifted, but Elverum’s mind state has not. "As long as I am drawing breath, the world still exists/ But when I die, everything will vanish," he sings on "Planets".
