Mount Eerie
Sauna

THE REVIEW

"Life is like a mirror, it smiles at you if you look at it smiling"
Jim Morrison

It is simple to approach the new work of Phil Elverum, the deux ex machina behind The Microphones (a band active from 1999 to 2003) and for more than ten years, Mount Eerie. You will have to strip down and immerse yourself completely in the ten minutes saturated with rising drones of the title track "Sauna," ten minutes of cathartic purification and total relaxation, a brief period to leave behind the thoughts and moods that your day has given you.

You will feel light and free and ready to listen to a warm and enveloping album made of lo-fi guitars that eerily remind of the legendary Grandaddy (listen to "Turmoil" to believe), a layered and complex work created with a massive, yet never excessive, use of drones ("Dragon" and "This" above all). Twelve tracks where everything blends at a high temperature: the voices and female choirs, the bells of "Spring" fading into intrusive and disturbing electronics, the rare explosions ("Youth"), the off-notes of "Planets," the cacophonic accelerations of drums and guitars ("Boat") or the sufferings of "Pumpkin" where the acoustic guitar gives way to drones only to return, beautiful and heartbreaking.

An album melancholy and misty, introverted and contemplative, solitary and calm like a high mountain lake under a gray sky. An album to listen to outdoors, perhaps under a blanket of clouds, facing a breathtaking panorama. An album romantic and irrational where your feelings and dreams will take on a role of primary importance. An album difficult to tell and interpret because what is tight somewhere within us, every time we let it out, takes on different and subjective forms.

"Sauna" will be the mirror of your feelings, the objective manifestation of your "self".