Ocean Roar is the second of a pair of albums Phil Elverum recorded recently on extended break from tour. Holed up in a de-sanctified church in the town of Anacortes, Wash., he began making music of heightened attention-- to surroundings, to his consciousness, to nature. The albums are full of the kind of observations you find time to make only when you haven't talked to anyone for a few weeks. May's Clear Moon was a dreamy fantasia about home, its comforts, and also the trickle of anxiety you feel when you are reminded of its fragility. The midnight-black Ocean Roar, meanwhile, is an experiment in imagined homelessness: It has a facing-the-beast quality of a punishing spiritual quest, as if Elverum steeled himself and left his house at midnight, barefoot, and just kept walking.
Clear Moon opened with the faint sigh of a single acoustic guitar-- a tree branch scraping your bedroom window, maybe-- but Ocean Roar's "Pale Lights" opens on a storm, an an ominous churn of organ and drums signaling the imminent arrival of bad feelings. As he always does, Elverum shapes sounds so that they arrive in tantalizing pulses: When he sings, "a small yelp on the wind/ And then, more roaring," over the murk of the music, which has suddenly died down, you are squinting through the album's black-night sound to discern moving shapes just as he is. This odd sensation, of straining to hear music piping through buds wedged directly into your ears, is a good sign that you're in Elverum's world; it gives his music a fragile air, like something that might not survive without your intervention.
Elverum's voice sounds more frail than ever here, flanked by bleak, oppressive towers of electric guitar. He's talked about the influence of black metal on his music before, and it has surfaced sonically on Wind's Poem and elsewhere, but Ocean Roar is the first place you can feel it: The spine-scraping, all-sixteenths tremolo'd guitars of the Popol Vuh cover "Engel Der Luft" channel the tinny evil of early black-metal recordings; "Waves" pounds mercilessly with drum rolls and a nastily distorted bass guitar for nearly its entire running time, with Elverum surfacing only for a moment to mumble the album's title and disappear beneath the noise. He casts himself as a small force lost in the wake of something huge, and seems mostly interested in black metal for its elemental dread.
In the middle of all this gnarled, frozen-gray bleakness, the gentler moments gleam like snow-globe hallucinations. "I Walked Home Beholding" is the charmed center of the record, the moment when the noise clears and Elverum surveys, with his signature quiet awe, the power of nature to bury his small town. It is the kind of redemptive, reassuring note that many might choose to close on; everything's all right, kids, here comes the moon. Or, in Elverum-speak: "Totally at peace with the meaninglessness of living." But the final track, immediately following "I Walked Home", is a seven-minute, tar-thick pulse of droning guitars (one of two slightly overlong instrumentals on this quite short record) that threaten to blot out everything else before them, before cutting off, sharp, hot, and sputtering, trailing abruptly into an unsettled silence. What Elverum wants to convey with this rude closing is unclear, but one thing is certain: The storm, metaphorical or otherwise, has closed back in behind him.
