On the last Mount Eerie album, A Crow Looked at Me, Phil Elverum gave a spare and devastating testament to his wife, Geneviève, who died from cancer in 2016. “Death is real,” Elverum sang in its first moment, and the next 40 minutes barely strayed from the blow of those three words.
On Mount Eerie's new song, “Distortion,” death is still real, but its scope has expanded. It's no longer confined to the few months before and after Geneviève's death, though he still calls to her, still refers to her as an enduring “you.” Geneviève is present, a vivid memory coursing through his every living moment, as Elverum strains to imagine his future and drifts into philosophical reveries.
“The first dead body I ever saw in real life was my great-grandfather’s," Elverum sings as the 11-minute song begins to take shape. Later, he adds, “The second dead body I ever saw was you, Geneviève/When I watched you turn from alive to dead right here in our house.” In between these two bodies lies an expanse of wondering, as Elverum tries to pin down what life means if it all ends the same way. “Though my life is a galaxy of subtleties/My complex intentions and aspirations do not matter at all/In the face of the crushing flow of actual time,” he decides.
Behind his words, two guitars thrum, one brushing through arpeggiated chords and the other plugged in, blaring distorted bass notes intermittently. There are vocal harmonies and piano trills accentuating certain lyrics, details that Crow mostly stripped away. Just as Elverum's lyrics now reach beyond the solitary cell of grief, so does his instrumentation. He then wonders how he will be remembered after his own death, what memories will linger in his descendants, and his guitars yawn away from him, searching. As Elverum continues to pick at impossible questions, he situates Genevieve's death within the full context of his life.
