The Stranger Lauds Mount Eerie’s “Devastating” New LP

Seattle’s famed alt-weekly, The Stranger, is yet another publication that has been stunned by Mount Eerie‘s newest album A Crow Looked At Me.

Contending that the album articulates “the most exquisite desolation you’ve ever heard,” the review places Phil Elverum’s work into the context of bereavement pieces by Virginia Wolfe, Joan Didion, Lou Reed, and even Eric Clapton. “At the risk of putting too fine a point on anything,” goes the review, “it’s safe to say that A Crow Looked at Me makes beggars of them all in one very specific way: If all grief art is an effort to “make sense” of loss, and the best of it contains a resignation to the senselessness of it, Elverum’s record is a present-tense document of the process of reconciling sense and senselessness. And failing to reconcile it, then trying again… [This album is a piece of] bracing, shattering, vivid, living art that makes you roil with sympathy and empathy, holds you spellbound, makes you burst into tears, stops you crying with the blunt force of a single detail that makes your tears feel suddenly vulgar, offers no comfort, except maybe the very small, very cold one that we are united by aloneness.”

Read the full review here.