Spectreview: Mount Eerie w/ Julie Dorian – Lost Wisdom Pt. 2

-BLUE-

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People used to say, “With age comes wisdom.” Ever since the start of the information age, every continuing generation reaching a tenuous adulthood feels older, internally, than the previous. How many of us have feared the loss of our vitality, of our potential, by the start of our 20s? Indeed, the last decade of indie music seemed obsessed with this anxiety: when Mac Demarco chastised himself on “Salad Days,” it felt like he was tapping into some yet-unforged train of thought.

Ironic then, how this attitude is really born from residual naiveté instead of some earned sagacity. When Phil Elverum wrote Lost Wisdom, he had just turned 30, the point where many artists start to anticipate their relevance slipping away. Who knows if he ever considered himself an old soul, but his fans likely have, as his work under Mount Eerie (and with The Microphones in the 90s) largely centered around personal, confessional tunes that perilously scraped skin and bones. How much has changed since then? True love bore truer tragedy (which then bore even truer art), and two unspeakably devastating albums later, we’re back to redefine just how little Elverum actually knew about life back then. Lost Wisdom Pt. 2, like it’s predecessor, is a series of musings on paradise lost and bears the ochrey vocal presence of Julie Doiron, and like many of Elverum’s projects, its a treasure trove of crushing riches. As expected of Mount Eerie, Images are austere and rife with natural warmth, narrative details flaunt novelistic structures, poetic excerpts punctuate quotidian observations, and there are enough touches of enveloping synths and stark piano to offset the constant thrum of Elverum’s pensive guitar.

The “Pt. 2” appended onto the title carries more poignancy than one might expect: everything after A Crow Looked At Me could be considered a part two, so effectively did that album embody the life-altering power of sober grief. Elverum’s old enough now to understand the ephemerality coursing through all things, which is partly the focus of this record: many tracks bely the starkness of change, from the explosive “Widows” to the corrective koans of (“Real Lost Wisdom”) to the inventory of buried history in “When I Walk Out of the Museum.” Even the album’s opener, a rumination on the fallacy of certainty (“Belief”), is cut by its closing track (“Belief Pt. 2”), which sees Elverum boldly committing to a certainty in love. It’s not in a specific love though (his recent short-lived marriage to Michelle Williams looms over this record), it’s in the strength it takes to love again even after chaos sweeps in like a hurricane. It’s in this way that Lost Wisdom Pt. 2 beats with life-affirming power, functioning as a crucial break from the project’s recent weight and as a harbinger of Elverum’s continued ascent.

Recommended for first (and last) coffee dates.