Mount Eerie - Ravens

They say "everything is temporal, but death". Death, no matter how it occurs, no matter if it's peaceful while someone's sleeping, is the most violent act for the one who has to continue living. It's a shocking act that makes us question a lot of things, because how is it possible that this person that meant so much to us is suddenly gone forever? No matter how rational or how spiritual you could be, nothing prepares you to death.

And death inspire art, countless works have been made (books, paintings, films, songs) thanks to the afterthoughts and musings during grief. From recent memory, Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree, School of Seven Bells' SVIIB, and Sufjan Stevens' Carrie & Lowell have came after the lost of a son, a lover and a mother. But every duel is different, so Mount Eerie's A Crown Looked at Me comes to offer that personal micro universe of grief that occurred to Phil Elverum after he lost his wife; the universe of a father that now has to raise his baby girl on his own after a painful cancer took the love of his life away.

Mount Eerie strips his music from every other sound that it's not his voice and his guitar. And he offers us his most personal thoughts, his most personal reflections of how life continues, even when at times he forgot that death happened and he still tries to select what are the pieces of his day that he will share with his wife when she returns from... and then realizing that she won't.

Ravens tackles how much in our most vulnerable moments we desperately seek for hidden meanings in things. Two black birds flying toward the island where they intended to move. At that moment he needed that to be a sign, he needed the comfort of a higher power to explain him what all this suffering was about, but if that was the sign, he never got to understand what it meant. Then he depicts moments of his life after the loss; going back to a place where they were happy, scattering her ashes in the sea, grieving in the forests, as if he was still looking for signs in the nature.

It is heavy in the full honesty it portrays. There are moments when he just breaks structures, he tries to fit the word huckleberries in a space that was clearly designed for a three syllables word, like a child that is just learning how to rhyme, but that exactly is what he is at that moment, a child that doesn't really understands what he is going through, but feels that need to tell us about how he picked berries for the woman he still loves.