MOUNT EERIE

Straight up: this may be the worst record released this year. Phil Elverum, for reasons that aren’t, and probably never will be, clear, has re-recorded some Mount Eerie staples (largely drawn from the Ocean Roar and Clear Moon LPs) and … smothered everything in autotune. But not good autotune, like the autotune that gives Believe by Cher its gorgeously melancholy melismatic shimmer, or the autotune that turned numerous T-Pain songs into 10/10 club bangers. A horrible, mewling, plasticky, hard-on-the-ears autotune that strips previously doomy, elemental songs of any pull and power and turns them into utter shit. On the first few listens this writer was searching for conceptual clues, attempting to work out Elverum’s intent, trying to assess why he thought it was worth making the effort to release it into the world. In kinder moments we wondered if, maybe, it was meant as a cousin to the kind of hyperreal jams that James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never have been exploring on recent records, a reclamation of maligned sounds. Perhaps there’s potential for admiring the creator’s perversity in putting this out. Then the reverie dissipated, and it was still as bad as we’d thought. Pre Human Ideas has all the gravitas of a novelisation of Inbetweeners the Movie. It’s an embarrassment, a travesty.

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Words: Josh Baines