Mount Eerie’s “Sauna” isn’t quite a lullaby for the lonely, but it is good company.
With a slow breath in and a heavy breath out, Phil Elverum eases into his latest album under the name .
This is his first release in three years, and for some of that time Elverum was holed up in a cabin in Norway, which is probably part of the reason why “Sauna” feels incredibly lonely. Even at moments when he cedes vocal duties to a few women, itap as if he invited them in briefly and was once again alone in that room in the snow. (Or, given the album’s warmth and title, a sauna.) Itap not necessarily sad and itap hardly ever dark, itap just very much something that was made by someone alone with his thoughts.
The four and a half minutes of organ drones that follow that first deep breath set the tone for an austere record. The 10-minute opening title track is quiet and minimal — the droning is only eventually broken up by sporadic splashes of percussion as Elverum sings in his meditative, stream-of-consciousness way. Lyrics on “Sauna” vary from more traditional, straightforward folk stuff — “I don’t think the world still exists / Only this room in the snow” — to the modernist, “Red Wheelbarrow”-like poetry of a line like, “Tractor idling two blocks away / In the fog, unseen.” Sometimes he even half-sings about getting coffee, and if you’re going to do that, the music better be beautiful.
As beautiful as “Sauna” is, it can easily lose you attention. For every song as light and pretty as the quietly cooing “Dragon” or the relatively upbeat and gently bouncing “Books,” there’s something like “Empitness,” where the droning becomes almost oppressive. Itap the kind of record you need to listen to while doing nothing other than sitting quietly. When you direct your attention to it, the music rewards you with the lovely details and the obvious care put into it, but the music never demands your attention. The only exception is “Boats” — a seething, gnashing, startling break from the calm. Instead, it floats around you unobtrusively until the finale of crashing drums and growling and screeching electric guitars. “Sauna” isn’t quite a lullaby for the lonely, but it is good company.
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Ashley Dean is an editor and designer for YourHub at the Denver Post and a regular contributor to Reverb.
