No Flashlight, Mount Eerie's first studio album, comes with a huge poster/map/Farmer's Almanac thing, which is meant to help explain the music and look pretty doing so. It isn't the first time Phil Elverum, the band's inscrutable leader, has written an album with grandiose narrative threads and laid them out in liner notes. Mount Eerie, his last record as Microphones, tackled-- in language that was difficult despite its puerile concision-- the Sun, Solar System, and Universe, plus ol' Mount Eerie herself.
But while that record came with an attractive but relatively modest fold-out poster (all black ink printed on diaphanous wax paper), No Flashlight's visual companion is a freaking atlas, complete with beatific photographs and Elverum's wobbly prose. Window-dressing on an epic scale, its inclusion sends the message that understanding is required to access enjoyment.
No Flashlight is the most musically undistinguished Elverum-related project to date, including Microphones' intractable early albums and Mount Eerie's shoddily-recorded live and tour-only material. The album's laissez-faire production fails to anchor its quaint, melody-allergic songs. In turn, Elverum's retiring vocals float to the top, which is a horrible place for them. It's a textural trainwreck that sabotages the music before one can even focus on lyrics or guitar lines. So the distraction of an expository outpouring makes sense.
Demanding listener input-- as Elverum does here by not-so-subtly inviting us to ponder him-- isn't a bad thing. But courting ears with such esoteric hooey is disingenuous and annoying. Elverum used to be able to hide his most solipsistic moments behind ambitious music; he now makes boring music that is premised on his persona and the explanation thereof. This is theoretical music in a whole 'nother sense: Largely untechnical and musically staid, the meaning lies not in the notes, not in the colossal liner spread, and not even really in the words, which are feebly expository and largely unsatisfying. The value, we are led to believe, lies somewhere apart from the music.
Elverum sings in an quietly anguished voice-- like a cult leader, it's only as powerful as what he puts behind it. Here, Elverum's a lone sojourner; Mount Eerie's gray performances put the diffident singer cruelly in the foreground, where he founders.
Has his voice changed? Hardly. Coy, lethargic, and almost drunkenly tuneless, this is the same guy from Microphones. Only now he has nowhere to hide. On "The Glow," pt. 2, his former band's penultimate and best album, Elverum wrapped inner-sanctum ruminations in warm, whooshing instrumentals, rich in assertive melodies. No Flashlight is comparatively ascetic. Melodies are sparse but the music isn't quite minimal. Opener "I Know No One" subdues a plaintive guitar line in accordion swell and excessive, frequently mic-clipping percussion. Unaccessorized, the six-string would sound brilliant-- a counterpoint to Elverum's ugly-beautiful vox-- but the line is swallowed up.
On "How?", notes cluster in disorganized spurts, while the 1st Mt. Eerie Tabernacle Hummers fill the voids with their closed-lip sounds. "Stop Singing" opens beautifully-- flashes of guitar tussle with clarinet vapors, evoking an unlikely forebear: Talk Talk. But it's just an intro, soon to be supplanted by a bass/drums vamp that dispenses with lo-fi's anchoring warmth, keeping the shabbiness.
Elverum previously espoused a very un-singer/songwriterly preference for sound over persona. But No Flashlight is quick to dispel any confusion around its focus. "I Know No One" drops the mission statement bombshell: "Knowing no one understands these songs/ I try to sing them clearer/ Even though no one has ever asked, 'What does Mount Eerie mean?'". The best tracks are those on which he's mollified: by Glow-sized guitar wash and skittish drums on "The Moan", or gusty tuba and a second-line beat on "The Universe Is Shown".
I revisited my Microphones LPs, which I haven't spun regularly for a couple years, to see if evolving tastes, globalization, or something else isn't to blame for my indifference to Mount Eerie. Verdict? "The Glow," pt. 2 is still fantastic; It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water still very good; and Mt. Eerie still trippy as hell. If the forthcoming Singers is any indication, Mount Eerie got some moxy in 'em yet. But your enjoyment of No Flashlight will depend on your interest in Phil Elverum, and whether or not you've the patience to wade through this sonic tub-full of Jonestown juice. Once you find him, he's just as fetchingly impossible. But when the pleasure is this conditional, it becomes fuzzy what all the fuss is over.
