Mount Eerie

As Phil Elverum continues to dig up the past, the Pacific Northwesterner has unloaded yet another collection of old songs, Dawn. The album’s 19 Mount Eerie tracks stem from Elverum’s sojourn to northern Norway, where he bunked up in an isolated, snow-smothered cabin in the winter of 2002/’03. For his dedicated followers, most songs from this time will be familiar ones, with many previously appearing in alternate forms on Seven New Songs, Eleven Old Songs and various live albums. But only now on Dawn does Elverum’s Norway period feel properly rendered. With just an acoustic guitar and his voice, the back-to-nature songwriter puts his most tender and introspective foot forward as he presents some of his strongest, most personal work with tracks like "Wooly Mammoth’s Mighty Absence” and "With My Hands Out.” Packaged together, the songs become an intense and rather moving listen, making you feel for the guy as you hear him work out whatever ghosts were haunting him back at that cabin. And if the 19 songs aren’t enough, along with the LP version, Dawn is available as a 144-page book, which includes a CD, drawings, photos and some "very intense journal writing” from Elverum’s cabin fever.