09/22/08
Text: Scott Indrisek
You know how you reach a certain point in your mid-to-late 20s when seeing live music no longer has the visceral, stomach-tingling thrill it once had? When you’d rather sit at home watching Netflix DVDs than stand around in a stuffy venue with people smoking surreptitious pot and bitchy bartendresses charging $7 for lukewarm, flat beer in plastic cups, because unlike those now-defunct McCarren Pool Parties, your Super Special Media Person VIP status doesn’t come with unlimited drink tickets? (Note to publicists: Please make this happen. Soon.) Fortunately, now and again, a live double bill comes along that makes the schlep worth it. Case in point: Mount Eerie and WHY? at the Bowery Ballroom, mid-September 2008.
Like most people, I’d stumbled on the Microphones in college—all that wall-of-noise folk fuzz and plaintive, wounded wailing really hit its mark then, and would continue to be awesome, long after we realized that people like Conner Oberst were self-centered prats, the real presidents of a “nation of whiners.” The Microphones was essentially Phil Elverum, who has, a la Will Oldham, gone through a couple moniker transitions in his day. Now he’s called Mount Eerie, which has a nice ring to it, and makes me think of the Pacific Northwest, which—oddly enough!—is where Phil Elverum is from. (Note: I have never been to the Pacific Northwest. Someone please send me there. Soon.) Mount Eerie’s next album, Lost Wisdom, hits store in early October, and he’s joined on the record by Julie Doiron and Fred Squire.
Here’s a few thoughts about Mount Eerie, a.k.a. Phil Elverum, playing live: affix a gob of a less goofier, more morose Jonathan Richman to a piece of Jeffrey Lewis’ more Leonard Cohen-leaning side. Mold that up into a ball of weird wax—and make it sing, pretty much on key. Then give that chimera an electric guitar, and a habit of playing songs that are over before you know it, and also riffing in a way that is herky-jerky and lo-fi and so un-rock’n’roll that it is beyond rock’n’roll. That’s Mount Eerie. (I might be killed for making this tortured comparison, but you know what? I’m throwing it at the wall and hoping it sticks.) Elverum, alone on-stage with aforementioned electric guitar, is also capable of controlling a room in much the same way that I imagine Jeff Buckley did in his day—contorting the instrument and making it do all kinds of unexpected, wild flips. This was folk drenched in distortion. It was beautiful and captivating and Elverum was charming, especially when he ended each song with a sort of abortive curtsey. Oh, and he was also wearing a t-shirt that extolled the virtues of peace alongside the disembodied heads of George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein.
WHY? was up next. As my concert companion noted, they were way dorkier looking than expected. Lead singer Yoni was beardless—perhaps a recurrence of the alopecia that gave birth to their last album’s title?—and dorky exterior aside, proceeded to destroy with a set that plucked liberally from their latest, as well as Elephant Eyelash. (Despite frequent exhortations from the crowd, they refrained from “fucking playing that fucking Cure cover oh please God.” But here it is.) All the little instrumental snippets that I’d once assumed would be sampled or laptopped during a live set turned out to be, well, actual little instrumental bits played by sentient human beings. (Hey you, dexterous keyboard player whose name I am too lazy to look up right now—you deserve a raise!) Yoni multi-tasked—xylephoning and snaredrumming while he sang or rapped or whatever you’d call it. Choruses that were explosive on record were toned down a bit, or adapted, morphing into new beasts. I was reminded of the reasons that WHY? has avoided being exiled from my “eternal repeat” playlist for the past few months. And I’m still sticking by the comparisons I made when I wrote about the band for Anthem in print—Yoni’s delivery does have something distinctly They Might Be Giants about it, a certain shared, overly erudite and dweebish nasality. (I am amazed that my spell check is telling me that ‘nasality’ is actually a word. Perhaps it doesn’t mean what I’m intending, but let’s just assume.) Ditto Soul Coughing, though WHY? (mercifully) avoids the beat poetic nonsense that dated that band about thirty seconds after they formed.
To summarize: buy these records, see these bands. That’s all. Good night.
