The album is as much about the purpose of art as anything else. Throughout the album, he struggles with the realisation that Geneviève’s true nature is gone, his attempts to recreate her failing because of the distance time has created between them. Elverum’s unfussy guitar playing colours lyrics with new shades of light, quietly guiding the listener to the places he describes with such vivid detail, into his frame of mind. The usual songwriting formalities are stripped away. The songs are stripped of a protective layer of artifice that can often provide a comforting distance. For many, including himself according to a Pitchfork interview, the album barely qualifies as music. “This is what my life is like now,” he sighs in the album’s bleakest breath. To know Elverum is a real person is crushing. ‘Now Only’ is that experience translated on record. When that feeling settles, and we know it’s not the case, death is just absurd. We live in a surreal existence, waiting for the loved one to walk through the door, seeing them as real in our dreams. For many, the reality of death takes much longer to hit. It’s living on after the death of a loved one, dealing with the absurdity of it all quietly, as their memory distorts, flickering through less frequently. It’s after the wake, when the guests have given their condolences and walked out the door. Bowie even wrote his own, the brilliant bastard. We’ve all heard them and been affected by them. We listened to personal stories of love, misery and memory, sharing in some catharsis at an uncomfortable proximity, but one still manageable, easy to catagorise. That first grief-stricken LP dealt with the immediate aftermath of Genevieve’s passing, like the most intimate of wakes. “Death is real,” Elverum said on this album’s older brother record, 2017’s ‘A Crow Looked at Me’, impossible to avoid the reality of it. It’s all painted with such specificity of emotion and place, closing in to every detail – like the postcards on a fridge on the album’s cover, or the ritual morning acts of a grieving father, on this final song.
TOUCHE AMORE CONDOLENCES LYRICS FULL
The entirety of their relationship is mapped out, from the life-affirming beginning, a chance meeting full of hope and possibility on ‘Tintin in Tibet’, to the failure to grasp out to any sense of his wife in the album’s final lines (“With arms reached and run my fingers through the air / Where you breathed, touching your last breath / Reaching through to the world of the gone with my hand empty”). I’ve never been to this home, met his wife, or been in Elverum’s position, but I feel like I know it all. It’s the house he continues to share with his young daughter, whose amorphous childhood grief he describes so painfully on this song. The family home he shared with his wife Geneviève before her passing from pancreatic cancer. You can hear the house breathing in ‘A Crow, Pt. I press play again, to make sure I have it right. Still, the rawness of it – in its cracks, its wavering pitch and howling moans – something about it makes you avert your eyes, even when you’re wrapped up in the story. He rarely raises his voice above a whisper. It’s a masterpiece, my first 10/10, which shouldn’t be a big deal, but vanity and all that. But the review is already finished and I know how I feel. I’m reviewing the project for Loud And Quiet and so I had no choice, I tell myself. My laptop keeps reminding me that I’m up soon, but it feels wrong to cut the album short. I’ve been a mess for the past half an hour. Enveloping, sour, intimate and finger-picked, like much of the album. The final elegy from ‘Now Only’, Phil Elverum’s latest album as Mount Eerie, is in its opening guitar notes. Slouched up, hair matted, sinking into a hoody beneath my duvet.
At three in the morning, I’m sobbing while ‘Crow, Pt. I think about my dad’s death all the time, but I haven’t cried about it in years, so long that I can’t name when or where.
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