Recap Mount Eerie at High Noon Saloon

Despite the two drum kits and huge gong that sat behind him on the High Noon Saloon's stage Saturday night, Phil Elverum's personality as a performer didn't change much. The A.V. Club wouldn't exactly accuse the Mount Eerie leader of having a megalomaniac stage presence, and his beautiful but matter-of-fact vocal melodies often trailed off under the band's volume, as if he meant for them to drift down and settle between his sandaled toes. Elverum's raw electric guitar, the well-arranged but often dinky-toned keyboards of Julia Chirka and Nick Krgovich, and the doubled-up drums of Paul Benson and Nicholas Wilbur beefed up the pounding black-metal gloom that accents Mount Eerie's new album Wind's Poem. Rather than turn his solo project into some kind of mutant metal show, though, Elverum used the band's heavier sound like a big fat charcoal pencil, scrubbing its shades into the excellent, meditative songwriting he's reliably done for years.

He often scrubbed furiously. As the band kicked off an entire Wind's Poem set (basically the whole album minus two songs), he turned to face his amp and chug out dense chords as Benson and Wilbur joined forces on the opening blastbeat of "Wind's Dark Poem." On the album, these elements get rather blurred together in foggy ambience, but here they dominated the songs, often reducing Elverum's voice to even more of a murmur. The integration wasn't lock-tight, but not clumsy, either. Wilbur used the big gong with admirable subtlety on "Through The Trees," adding a subliminal rumble under the keyboards' soft, prolonged chords, and "The Hidden Stone" especially found the whole band shifting between guttural slams and tortured quiet sections.

Still, the band's cold-fish stage presence broke up the serene patience the album inspires. So did a couple of the songs: Was "Between Two Mysteries," which is gorgeous on the album, supposed to sound that much like a chintzy disco number? Between songs, Elverum reluctantly bantered a little bit, struggling to find much to talk about, ("um, what else?"), and confessed he felt "a little nude" without sick tourmate Tara Jane O'Neil playing guitar in the band.

Elverum's vocals suddenly hit a burst of conviction in the middle of "Ancient Questions," as he sang (and, more so than usual, enunciated), "Nothing means nothing / Everything is fleeting," even making some hand gestures. "Lost Wisdom Pt. 2" dynamically alternated more metal blasts with dissonant keyboard swells. "We're not gonna play an encore," Elverum said before the album's final track, "Stone's Ode." "Let's just get that out there." Elverum's songwriting and the metal he's curious about went for one more uneasy meeting in the woods: He made a wave-motion with his hand to accentuate a line about a "river of cold wind," then turned around for one more guitar vivisection. It's admirable that Elverum can borrow black metal's sounds and occasional nature obsessions without getting all creepy and megalomaniacal, but—considering what a solid, prolific artist he is, and the internal but grand themes of Wind's Poem—he could've gotten away with lording it over us just a bit more.