Insular and misanthropic though they may be, most depressing albums are ear comfortfood. They’re ultimately trying to entertain you just as much as they’re trying to make you cry. Mount Eerie’s “Now Only,” though, isn’t one of these albums. Phil Elverum, the sole mastermind behind the project, takes you on an anguishing 40-plus minute journey through the depths of death and despair so vivid and relenting that the record doesn’t make for an entertaining listen by any means. What it does make for, however, is a wholly gorgeous and capitvating one.
“Now Only,” even more so than other works of art, is impossible to separate from its creator. Elverum spends his ninth album grieving his late wife, Geneviéve Castrèe, who passed away from cancer a year after giving birth to the couple’s only daughter, and struggling to make sense of being alive “in the blast zone” of his loss. The album acts as a spiritual successor to last year’s “A Crow Looked At Me,” which centered on the same tragedy in the months and weeks after it unfolded. By “Now Only,” it’s clear time has passed, but not nearly enough to close Elverum’s wounds.
The opening track, “Tintin in Tibet,” begins “I sing to you Geneviéve” before Elverum finally acknowledges “you don’t exist” in his ethereal, eternally boyish voice. He ends the song by repeating the same line, while starting the next track, “Distortion,” “but I don’t believe in ghosts or anything.” Since the beginning of his recording career, Elverum’s vocal timbre has always struck the perfect sweet spot between sounding wounded, mysterious and innocent, something that’s no different here.
His lyrics, similarly to Crow, are incredibly verbose, almost conversational in approach. His sprawling and unsubtle — “metaphor free” as he describes them — ruminations on death give the album an uncomfortable intimacy that at times feels like an invasion of Elverum’s privacy to hear. Listen at your own risk. Though cheery lyrics are the album’s primary focus, the instrumentation, all performed by Elverum, is fantastic in its own right. While “Crow” offered more skeletal song structures and placed emphasis on leaving musical space, “Now Only” brings a welcome sense of musical variety.
From beginning to end, he alternates between intricate acoustic guitar finger-picking and minimalistic, sometimes fuzzy and doom metal-esque electric guitar, often multiple times within the same songs. His drumming and bass work isn’t anything fancy, though this isn’t a complaint because anything else would take away from the lyrics. The words and instrumentation compliment each other incredibly well, as Elverum has a good sense of when to layer his songs with busy guitars and when to leave space and let his lyrics do the work. Like Crow, I can’t listen to this without feeling like it shouldn’t exist. “Now Only” is a byproduct of a tragedy that never should’ve happened, and from start to finish it’s damn-near impossible to distract yourself from this. It’s a project Elverum cleary didn’t want to make so much as he was compelled to with every fibre in his being, something that makes the record in its entirety a captivating experience and an obvious contender for any “Best of 2018” list. Just don’t expect it to bring a smile to your face.