I think it’s an amazing triumph for lo-fi music, for indie folk and DIY producers and for experimental, collage-like songwriting. Phil Elverum broke so many boundaries with this record and I still think very few records in a similar lane even approach how daring and out there and leftfield it is. A lot of that is proven in the fact that Elverum in his own way had to go back with his new album and in a narrative-type fashion recount that entire time, because that time for him and for his fans is just so significant and so important. Even though it’s not the first Microphones album or the first time he was recording music or anything like that, it was definitely an “a-ha” moment and that’s borne out in the fact that he’s made this new LP and the fact that artistically a lot of his ideas that he’s been repeating and morphing and evolving to this day go back to this album. And a lot of his storytelling comes back to this album, too.
People who know or love his music live and die by this album. It’s an amazing tapestry of acoustic instrumentation and different fidelities of instrumental recording all mixed together at once. It sounds like it’s one cohesive, beautiful, harrowing thing, while simultaneously sounding like it required him to mine the sounds of a dozen different things from myriad different sources to cobble it all together.
