NYT Reviews Mount Eerie, New LP Seeks NACC 200 Chart Debut

“Phil Elverum has always been an impressionistic lyricist,” notes the New York Times in a new review of Mount Eerie‘s A Crow Looked at Me, “but here, the line is blurred between singing, speaking and raw emotional data dump.” According to the Times, Elverum’s intimate musical reaction to his wife’s death is “harrowing but tender — much more tender than harrowing… It’s the smallest details that stab hardest here — the ones that feel tossed off but are also the work of an elegant songwriter knowing just how to render devastation.” 

Anyone who has heard the album already knows that it is a singular and tragic accomplishment. In the Times‘ words, “So intense are these songs that it feels almost impolite to refer to them as art, which typically connotes an interest in aesthetics. There is sad music, which is to say music that deploys lyrical or musical motifs meant to connote misery. And then there is this album, which mostly exists in a space beyond those concerns. It is an album because a musician made it and it is broken up into songs, but it is also a diary, a balled-up tissue, found art.” Read the full review here. 

A Crow Looked At Me looks for NACC debuts this week after earning 5th Most Added at NACC. 

You can watch the video for “Ravens” below: