Popmatters Reviews The Microphones In 2020

According to Popmatters, “Phil Elverum‘s music, both as Mount Eerie and his earlier project The Microphones, exudes myth without fabricating image. He doesn’t sell listeners on an ideology or a way of life, though he details the mundanity of day-to-day life with lines alternatingly simple and metaphorically charged, promoting nothing save for quiet introspection. He doesn’t want to play stadiums to sell-out crowds, and he doesn’t say things like this to win over fans on fabricated principles or to make up for the ceiling of his limited mainstream appeal. He just seems to make music because he loves it, without any careerist tendencies on display.” The site has a glowing review of The Microphones in 2020, Elverum’s 44-minute long, single track album released earlier this year. “As he’s grown older,” the site writes, “the structures that hold his lyrics have continually frayed to the point of unspooling from anything resembling the verse-chorus-verse rock song. But Elverum’s songwriting has grown sharper, richer, truer, closer to moving ‘deeper, beneath pain, beneath the human.'”

This album, like so much of Elverum’s work, often inspires long passages of thoughtful words from reviewers who try to tackle it. The Popmatters review is no exception – read it here.