Clear Moon

AlbumMay 22 / 201211 songs, 41m 46s
Singer-Songwriter Avant-Folk
Popular Highly Rated

The first release in a projected two-volume set, *Clear Moon* was recorded in a \"de-sanctified\" church. Its songs feature a solemn sadcore and/or ambient metal feel, like the milder strains of Dolorean with touches of Spacemen 3 and Boris cresting over the horizon. \"The Place I Live\" creates a Sigur Rós–like slow burst of sound that features both plaintive vocals and modulated harmonies with a rhythm track that stutters in the background. Mount Eerie\'s Phil Elverum acts as both multi-instrumentalist and producer, playing his parts with a distinctive ear toward the end result. \"(something)\" is a brief interlude of porous textures that serves as the training ground for the ambitious \"Lone Bell,\" where an imaginary film score takes shape underneath the haze. \"House Shape\" cranks up like the backing tracks of a Velvet Underground–influenced garage band before blurring into a subliminal, ambient shape-shifting dance track/tone poem. The juxtapositions are inspired. Just when you think you have a track figured out, it does something completely unexpected. 

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8.3 / 10

Phil Elverum recently took an extended break from touring to record two albums in a studio he built in a deconsecrated church. The first of these albums makes a vast, cool sanctuary of itself and quietly beckons you into it.

C

Earlier this year, Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum, writer of the B-side “Get Off the Internet,” committed a genuinely ironic act: He started a Twitter account. Elverum’s tweets are purposefully flavorless, a critique on tweets themselves, but they’re a public sign—perhaps the first of his career—that his experience isn’t…

7 / 10

More so than many artists, Phil Elverum's Mount Eerie albums feel like chapters in a larger continuing work, and Clear Moon -- itself the first half of a two-album project released in 2012 -- is no exception.

7.0 / 10

Here's more plodding, plaintive, Pacific Northwest pabulum from Phil Elverum. This is the first of two full-lengths lined up to be released this year, both recorded in his new studio, a repurposed church in Anacortes, WA.

8 / 10

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4.5 / 5

Mount Eerie - Clear Moon review: Misunderstood and disillusioned, I go on describing this place and the way it feels to live and die

7 / 10