Spectreview: The Microphones – Microphones in 2020

-AQUA-

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“Anyway, every song I’ve ever sung is about the same thing
Standing on the ground looking around, basically.”

The old adage goes, “With wisdom comes age.” Its passivity makes it technically incorrect; wisdom actually comes with hard work, with opening yourself up to new ideas, exploring new horizons and reveling in new pains. But for people like Phil Elverum, wisdom happens against the will: your brain wired to spot the cracks in between mundanities, the specter of death hovering over your future, happiness always out of reach. Cruelly, we may have benefitted from his life journey more than he has, in the myriad brilliant records he’s released under The Microphones and Mount Eerie. Both those projects boast music that beats with the dark spirit of nature, a primordial force that defied explanation.

Microphones in 2020, Elverum’s recent resuscitation of the Microphones moniker after almost twenty years, might just be the closest we get to a Rosetta Stone or a Rosebud in his discography. Over three or four extended acoustic chords, Elverum provides one, long seamless rumination on the unending process of self-mythologizing and the contrasting significance of the present moment. It might be the most joyous thing he’s ever recorded based solely on how weightless his words feel, his sense of pride deepening the vividness of his revelries. He constructs the record to match his message, its structure flowing and ebbing like the ceaseless waterfall of time that backgrounds his musings.

For Elverum, who spent the last few years vocally grieving of the loss of his wife (and mother of his child) in song form, this catharsis must have felt particularly empowering. Having the luxury of examining your entire oeuvre, “shaking off the weight of expectations,” only comes from decades of devotion to the art. In that sense, Microphones in 2020 offers both a sense of culmination and a peek behind the curtain in the same way Blackstar captured David Bowie’s dying breath or Abbey Road elided over the friction of a four-piece in crisis. It’s more than that though: it’s both a hyper-specific self-examination and a selfless meditation that allows us, as always, to assess our own experiences through Elverum’s prism.

Highly recommended for coffee and low-tide.