You can’t beat a bit of dreamy folk-tinged oddness. Mount Eerie hail from Anacortes, Washington, that green and rainy and woody land hugging the Puget Sound, somewhere betwixt Seattle and Vancouver. The kind of place I can imagine makes you hole up in a freezing garage for months on end making slightly ominous fuzzed out space-pop. The kind of music in which you can hear the damp cold air swishing past the microphone, chilling everything around it. Music for long, cold, dark, soggy nights; music for a landscape of forests and mountains and a sea that will suck you down and crush you under a continental plate. That’s what “House Shape” is.
Sounding like The Besnard Lakes after a night on Mogadon listening to Spaceman 3, this is a marvellously odd piece of acid-tinged narcotic wooziness, featuring a two minute krautrock intro followed by some undecipherable lyrics, before coming to a rather unexpected halt. Over this all is the a buzzy hum that feels like the kind of sound that valves make to keep themselves warm. All in all, I’ve become inordinately fond of it.
Plus, the band, which pretty much consists of Phil Elverum and a couple of folks helping out here and there, has possibly the best band website I have seen in years. Go on, go and have a look now. Brilliant design, a marvellous photoshopped image of a P.W. Elverum & Sun store, and all the lovely photos you can shake a stick at. This kind of site, with lots of things to buy, nice photos, lovely posters to buy, and even a $60 photo book, make me think that there’s life in the record industry yet, that there’s a way to be a proper Indie when you’ve got talent.
The album from which this stems is “Clear Moon”, and it’s released on May 22nd. I’d pre-order it if I were you. Going by this, it’s going to be marvellous.
Note: At time of writing this song has 48 “Likes” on Hype Machine. What the hell is wrong with everyone? Come on, this deserves more than that.