ALBUM REVIEW: "A Crow Looked At Me"

ALBUM REVIEW: "A Crow Looked At Me" - Mount Eerie

Death is obviously a subject that lots of musicians have attempted to tackle, with wildly varying results. My Chemical Romance's punk-opera classic The Black Parade uses it as the central piece of an epic concept record. Sun Kil Moon's album Benji loiters around in a depressive state of rumination about the immediacy of death. And take your pick of almost any black/death/doom metal album. But rarely does an album explore death in a way that is genuinely confronting and uncomfortable to listen to; A Crow Looked At Me - the ninth Mount Eerie record and thirteenth including Phil Elverum's previous work as The Microphones - does just that, and I found it really difficult to listen to.
A Crow Looked At Me documents Elverum's wife Geneviève's death at the hands of pancreatic cancer - a disease that kills 80% of patients within a year - leaving behind him and his eighteen month old daughter. Musically it fits snugly into a consistently above average discography of lo-fi recordings spanning folk, noise rock, indie and even black metal, but A Crow Looked At Me stands out as one of Elverum's most confronting, disarming and deeply personal lyrical outings to date. "Death is real", Elverum says on "Real Death", "and it's not for singing about, it's not for making into art." And while this is a really really beautiful album, sometimes I can't help but agree.

Favourite Songs: My Chasm and Emptiness, Pt. 2

Least Favourite Song: Swim

Rating: A-

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