Mount Eerie and Julie Doiron at Gates Of Heaven
All photos by Chris Hoppe
Mount Eerie gets morbid in harmony.
One of the oldest surviving synagogues in the nation, Gates Of Heaven (which sits in James Madison Park downtown) was designed for hushed reverence. Tuesday night’s audience behaved accordingly, taking in three singer-songwriters with almost meditative attention.
Chris Hoppe“Lovely room, lovely people. It’s Tuesday.” Ah, the things you can say with a Canadian accent. Dick Morello got things off to an amiable start under the moniker Calm Down It’s Monday, namedropping Madison expats and doling out DVD recommendations between Jonathan Richman-esque ditties. Fellow Canuck Julie Doiron took advantage of the rarefied vibe to take requests from deep in her back catalog, including a few French-language numbers, and the room was quiet enough to hear her softly mutter “oops” after a rare guitar flub.
Following their sets, the two reconvened with Mount Eerie leader Phil Elverum (formerly of The Microphones) for an intimate run through the new album, Lost Wisdom. Huddled on the tiny stage, the trio blurred the line between stage banter and small talk, directing asides at each other as much as at the crowd. Their mix of easy conversation and depressing songs made the show feel like a campfire at a funeral.
The set undeniably peaked early with a rousing, full crowd sing-along version of “Voice In Headphones.” The unsteady bliss generated by a large, untrained choir has marked some of Eleverum’s most powerful recordings (“I Can’t Believe You Actually Died,” “Uh Oh! It’s Mourning Time Again”), and hearing the effect in a synagogue was at once chilling and euphoric.
Nothing woud top that, but the trio valiantly soldiered through the remainder of the album, after which the band took off and left Elevrum to do a few solo numbers. For all its tentative beauty, Lost Wisdom is one dreary record. So after all those downers, it was something of a relief to finish the night with a few of his more upbeat songs about, well, death and the extinction of the natural world. But in an age when the chirping of cell phones is a reliable racket in any crowd, Elevrum’s ability to cultivate such pin-drop atmosphere is uncanny. It’s not every performer who can end a song by raising his acoustic guitar into the air, mumbling “Imagine that it turns into a dove,” and pull it off.
