Back when Wind’s Poem was nothing more than a twinkle in Phil Elverum’s eye, he—as he openly admitted—made the mistake of pre-billing it as a “colossal” album, setting himself up to fail miserably in the eyes of diehard fans and devoted critics. Looking forward, Elverum, the man behind The Microphones and, now, Mount Eerie, must have realized he would be forced to painstakingly create a congruous indie saga capable of knocking everyone back on their butts.
Wind’s Poem triumphs. Its dark, faintly persistent narrative of transformation and ruin is indeed the kind of thing that makes an epic record, and Elverum himself manages to continue his personal study of lo-fi metal in an extremely impressive manner.
Opening track “Wind’s Dark Poem” employs a combination of distortion and cymbal crashes in order to immediately reveal the black metal intentions of the album, but, almost as quickly as he laid it down, Elverum pulls the hardcore rug (woven in Valhalla by a hundred ghastly beasts) out from under our feet with the abruptly gentle “Through The Trees.” Its calm, quiet chords come in like a test of the Emergency Broadcast System, and the song rolls on for eleven and a half completely necessary minutes.
Even in the midst of intense musical experimentation, Wind’s Poem is Elverum at his most accessible. So deliberate and so intentional, the record is a pureblooded concept album with breathtaking transitions and pounding guitars, which typically overtake most of the vocal moments as words both literal and metaphoric attempt to assert their importance within the structure of the analogous soundscapes.
As this decade laden with indie rock comes to a close, Mount Eerie’s Wind’s Poem is a monumental achievement. Music and art are finally back together in a cheap motel bed, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Leave it to Phil Elverum to orchestrate an album about wind that truly blows listeners away.
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