| December 4, 2019 | Gunner Young | campus editor |
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Prepare to cry, because Mount Eerie’s “Lost Wisdom pt. 2” delivers the melancholic and poetic sounds that frontman Phil Elverum has saturated listeners with over this past decade.
Elverum, formerly of the indie-folk band The Microphones teams up once again with Canadian singer-songwriter Julie Doiron, who was also featured on “Lost Wisdom” back in 2008.
While “Lost Wisdom pt. 2” features many of the same trademarks that make a Mount Eerie project great, the lack of focus and the scattered songwriting give this particular album fewer reasons to love it.
Many fans already prefer the noisy, lo-fi nature of Elverum’s older work and find his newer material slow and drab. But albums like “A Crow Looked at Me” from 2017, featuring some of his most heartbreaking and personal lyrics ever recorded, leave few to doubt his songwriting prowess.
Combine this new style with a deviation from everything that made his projects great, and listeners are left with “Lost Wisdom pt. 2.”
The album begins decently enough, with the lengthy “Belief” setting the tone with its meandering melody and Buddhism-themed lyrical ideas. This is classic Mount Eerie and a shining spot of an otherwise dull album.
Other songs like “Widows” and “Love Without Possession” scratch the sad indie itch that one expects to satisfy with a Mount Eerie album.
Then there is “When I Walk Out of the Museum,” which doesn’t even sound like anything else from Mount Eerie’s catalog. The lyrics simply document everyday events like going to a museum in a poetic way.
Fans of Elverum might enjoy this view into his life, but the rest of the album, and also the original “Lost Wisdom” don’t lend themselves well to songwriting like this, and it feels out of place. Songs like this make this project somewhat of a disappointment.
The biggest flaw of this project is its name. “Lost Wisdom,” the predecessor to this album, came out in 2008. While it is impossible to expect an artist to write in the same style as they did more than a decade ago, there is essentially no relevance between the albums.
The original was catchier, bolder and overall better.
The lack of consistency makes this album difficult to listen to all the way through, and its short runtime means that there isn’t a lot to love here.
While fans of Mount Eerie might enjoy this album more than most, its disorganized and inaccessible nature make this record a dud in an otherwise amazing decade of music for Phil Elverum.
