Mount Eerie: Distorted Cymbals

Phil Elverum has been plenty busy in music career with a number of projects, but things have been quiet since Mount Eerie’s 2009 album, Wind’s Poem, so Distorted Cymbals acts as a few things at once. It’s the latest in the Dub Narcotic Disco Plate series of singles, it’s a small but welcome return, and it’s an appetizer for the Mount Eerie record due out later this year. The song itself is a solid success, twisting the Mount Eerie sound (yet again) into something rumbling yet spacious, distorted yet fragile at the center. The song starts and stops, building to these cliff’s-edge cymbal crashes, while the bass buzzes off an in-the-gut rumble the guitar glides over. Among all this crashing and buzzing, Elverum’s unassuming voice sounds both gut-shot and beautiful, cooing out lines of amazement — he tries to catch his breath, looks in wonder at the sky — while these sounds rattle around him. Calvin Johnson’s remix on the b-side, titled “Anglepoise Cymbals”, turns the song into something even more jagged and herky-jerky with chunks of melodica and even more negative space around Elverum. It’s an interesting twist, even if it doesn’t quite hold up as much as the original. Distorted Cymbals is just one new song by Elverum (done two ways), but it’s a promising, if humble, return.