News / / 30.05.13

MOUNT EERIE

St Giles in the Fields, London | May 24th

As satisfying as regular gigs can be, it’s always nice when an artist attempts something different, when they remove themselves and their audience from a potential-comfort-zone.

This was one of those performances. Gathering us in the palladian majesty of St Giles in the Fields – all creamily lit alcoves, gilded roof decoration, portraits of Moses by former painters to the royal court of Portugal – on a wet and windy Friday night in May, we huddled in hard-backed pews and nestled with backs to pillars and witnessed something otherly, something both intimate and wracked with distance, something that was resolutely not four men stood on stage in a room that reeked of freshly spilled pints and decade old cigarette butts. Something that, dare we say it, bordered on spiritual.

As Mount/Mt. Eerie, Phil Elverum has amassed a back catalogue of intensely lonely pastoral, buccolic, doom-and-black-metal inflected avant-indie that’s guaranteed to inspire slavish devotion amongst a certain type of person in their mid-20s; there’s potential for music this personal, this suited to solitary late, late nights turning into solitary early, early mornings, to fall a little flat, to sound a little solipsistic and self-absorbed. Luckily the current two-bassist-based line-up provided a perfectly weighted, and weighty, accompaniment to Elverum’s keening, plaintive vocals and Rothko washes of guitar. These were songs of nature, documentations of the changing seasons, the forces beyond our control, that which is at once eminently knowable and utterly mysterious. This dichotomy – for what is a church if nothing but a testament to the ultimate sense of the known unknown? – lent an innate sadness to the gentler tracks plucked from the Clear Moon and Ocean Roar LPs and an equally innate sense of pummelling intensity to the deep-forest howl of their derobed Sunn O))) two chord BM explorations.

Despite the odd malfunctioning pedal and a few minor technical hitches and glitches, Elverum and his all-girl band seemed fully at home in this most quietly spectacular of venues, stood in front of the altar, serenading their flock with perfectly crafted songs of devotion. This writer floated down the aisles on exit, the world seeming, for a little while at least, a clearer place.

 

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pwelverumandsun.com

Words: Josh Baines

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