hil Elvrum’s albums as the Microphones have always been focused around loose concepts—the elemental forces of wind, fire, and water have been woven into the fabric of his recent masterpieces—but never before to this extent. Similarly, Microphones recordings have always featured a large cast drawn from the fertile Olympia music scene, but Mount Eerie extends this spirit of collaboration to another level altogether.


Unlike the monolithic, sprawling The Glow, Pt. 2, Mount Eerie consists of just five songs in fifty minutes. The 19-minute “The Sun” is the greatest shock of all, beginning with a rambling introduction of static and frenzied drumming that slowly builds and recedes before giving way to Phil’s first vocals a full 10 minutes into the album. The build-up possibly goes on for too long without accomplishing much, but the delay does add a weighty impact to Elvrum’s first lines: “See me/ waving my handkerchief/ on the shore/ See my arm raised/ high.”


The title track is an even bigger departure from the Microphones S.O.P., as Elvrum invited friends and collaborators like Kyle Field of the Little Wings and Karl Blau to contribute their talents. The eight-minute track is actually a montage of several different songs, including one written and performed by Field and one by Blau. Unsurprisingly, the song isn’t quite consistent over its length. Towards the start of the track, a beautiful, near-a-cappella vocal part by a host of Olympia regulars is suddenly cut off by the intrusion of Field’s “rap.” Not much more than a shoddy Little Wings leftover, mocking (or maybe just copying) mainstream hip-hop in the form of a decidedly un-funky indie rock song, it drags down the whole track. Thankfully, Blau’s submission is much better, a low-key duet with Elvrum that fits in nicely with the head Microphone’s aesthetic.


The rest of the album fares much better, balancing the familiar with the experimental. The gorgeous plucked guitar of “Solar System” emerges from a haze of static, and Elvrum’s vocals are clear and up-front—a nice characteristic of this whole album. The first of two tracks called “Universe” is even better, with distorted percussion bouncing back and forth from speaker to speaker before exploding into fuzzy rhythms and guitar pyrotechnics. It’s Elvrum’s best headphones treat to date. It also contains the album’s most surprising moment, as K Records founder Calvin Johnson comes in for one line, playing the part of the Universe itself, stopping everything with his portentous baritone.


The album-closing second “Universe” song features another beautiful Elvrum vocal lead, as Johnson adds soaring howls to the background. The track ascends to a spiritual climax, musically reaching for the stars from the mountain’s peaks, and it’s the perfect closure to this strange record.


And as if all this wasn’t enough, K Records has also released two limited-edition EPs to accompany Mount Eerie: one featuring just the vocal tracks from the album, and the other just the rhythm tracks. The vocal album is a treat on a level with the LP itself, and in some respects is an even better listen. Almost completely a-cappella, with just a few instrumental tracks added to flesh out the arrangements as needed, The Singing From Mt. Eerie pares down its parent album to 23 minutes of singing. Without the instrumentals, these songs gain an unearthly power—Elvrum’s unsteady vocals are often joined by voiceless female accompaniment, to absolutely stunning effect. The duet between Elvrum and his labelmate Mirah from “Solar System,” on which the songstress repeats “I know you’re out there” in her lovely, childlike voice, is the EP’s highlight, all of its emotion and beauty contained in a few simple phrases sung over one another.


Even Field’s rap section is completely re-imagined. Here, joined only by a light acoustic guitar and a host of vocal sound effects, the song sounds much more genuine and less kitschy than it did in its album version. Otherwise, since the instrumentation on Mount Eerie was mostly minimal to begin with, the EP doesn’t really make drastic changes to the material.


The drums EP, a few interesting moments aside, is much less successful. The standout track is the first, featuring the tribal drumming from the intro to “The Sun.” Busy and complex, multiple rhythms course through this rich, dense sea of drums, and the result stands on its own even without the context of the album. But many of the other drum tracks included here just feel incomplete without the rest of the music to fill them out. The tracks from “Solar System” and “Universe” are interesting, but the missing guitar and vocal bits create conspicuous holes that aren’t filled. Since none of the material is reworked or fleshed out—the EP is exactly what it says it is: the drum parts from Mount Eerie—many of these cuts are lacking in the complexity that made the first track so compelling.


Taken as a whole, Mount Eerie (and its companion EPs) features Elvrum’s tightest song cycle yet, truly focusing and clarifying the themes and ideas he’s explored on all his albums. The record’s explorations of nature, mortality, and emotion aren’t anything particularly new to Elvrum, but his treatment of these heavy concepts here seems much more natural than in the past. Musically, it’s both his tightest and his most experimental album yet. Every song here has its own quirks and a very different sound from the others—unlike the multiple similar-sounding songs often found on other Microphones records. It’s wonderful to see Elvrum so ambitious following his critically acclaimed last album, unafraid of tinkering with his sound and trying new things. As a result, rather than getting The Glow, Pt. 3, we get to travel with him into the uncharted next ocean of Microphones territory.