Phil Elverum's latest experiment: audibility. Don't bother cranking up the headphones; "Singers" will find you. And in short order, no less. Opener "Let's Get Out of the Romance" dallies on a slow-sloshing guitar line and Elverum's wilted vox before the arrival of a towering chorale. That turn-- all three seconds of it-- resonates beyond anything on No Flashlight, Mt. Eerie's first studio album, released in August.
Why the turnabout? "Singers" is from the same mold as its forebear: a bleary, lo-fi aesthetic, organic, unadorned instrumentation, and the usual surfeit of opaque first-person narration. Even its premise-- Microphones/Mount Eerie oldies recast in "sing-along" versions-- promises business as usual. But "Singers" succeeds, for one, because you can actually hear what the fuck is going on. Flashlight was sinus infection listening-- all bass swell and muffled percussion burbling beneath tattered acoustic overlay. Melodies sank in a swamp of clipped, bleeding microphones. On "Singers", Eerie separates its milk from its mush; vocals streak through the interstices of piano and stringed instruments, no chafing.
It can't hurt, either, that the album features Elverum's best recent cuts. "Ut Oh! It's Mourning Time Again" does ditty with rare gestural lightness, the chorus scrambling for the guitar solo like a '66 T-Bird rattling toward a precipice. You hear a round of shrill, echoic howls rise up from all areas of the musical field, lending the song a disquieting but oddly jubilant hollowness. It's a wonderfully spontaneous moment that almost justifies the album's precious gag. Such macabre humor isn't a fresh cut from Elverum, but, gussied up with a tidy instrumental and enough team spirit to power Mt. Eerie to a Great Outdoor Games medal, its seldom been as sharp as on "I Can't Believe You Actually Died", whose titular campfire refrain flickers out in hysterical laughter.
Throughout "Singers", spontaneous off-mic sounds give the illusion of a space much larger than Elverum's studio digs. But what does the album achieve that's so different from any basic lo-fi recording? Does Elverum have a special ability to render his persona into aesthetic effects? If so, why has he most recently used it to make tedious, cynical music, knowingly devoid of the humanist warmth of The Glow, pt. II and It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water?
Wrist-slitter "Human" and van Gogh tribute "I Cut My Hands Off" get by on profound-seeming vox. Elverum's chants of "hu-man...hu-man..." on the former are a clever condensation of the songwriter's lyrical corpus, which has never strayed far from topics of nature, body, and spirit. But for the truly mantric, check "Do Not Be Afraid" and "So Your Big Black Cloud Will Come", both crushingly heavy dirges with concise (you're looking at 'em) lyric sheets. Dude's gotta know, though, not to make every line the denouement; save some of those catch-phrases for the dramatic moment.
So it's tough to give Elverum's lyrics laboratory attention when they're so pushy. Like William Carlos Williams without the punch line, his words are whittled down to deep salience then removed from any discernible context and looped ad infinitum. What sounds meaningful reads like jabberwocky. But at least "Singers" will help Microphones devotees-- feeling a bit maligned lately-- start listening again.
