(PW Elverum & Sun)A set of disconcertingly painful songs about the end of his first relationship after the death of his wife finds Phil Elverum at sea in sadness
It is the least of the unfairnesses to befall Phil Elverum that a late-career popularity surge came thanks to his candour about the death of his wife. As the Microphones, and then Mount Eerie, he had spent 20 years pushing lo-fi songwriting into profound and unwieldy places. Then, in 2016, Geneviève Castrée died from cancer. A 2017 album, A Crow Looked at Me, was uncharacteristically prosaic: the arrival of a backpack that Castrée had ordered for their infant daughter spelled out his desolation. Like Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, the album’s beauty attracted morbid sympathy from outside the usual quarters.