Microphones - Mount Eerie
(K)
Epic and theatrical, even experimental, but is it good?
Experimental pop isn't as scarce as I've always thought it was, from Robert Wyatt's solo output (especially Shleep) to the marriage of modern composing and indie rock that was Gastr Del Sol to, for god's sake, to The Beatles in their day and time, people have been innovating and exploring pop for forty years now, so why do I always feel like for some reason The Microphones are set apart from this? My only real guess at this is that coming out of something so juvenile and stale as indie pop, rather than pop proper—and really here we need to define our terms, pop being such a broad category, but at least I idiosyncratically define it, in its broadest possible sense, as songs with repeating themes that pay attention to melody and broad instrumentation, as opposed to say, rock, which seems to pay more attention to well, heaviness, loudness, fierceness, the stereotypical qualities that are conjured up at the mention of "rock" (unless one is a gemologist, of course). The Microphones then have a background of a very static and uninteresting form of music such that any exploration and innovation at all is going to be leaps and bounds above the rest. The Microphones don't stand out to me because they are so experimental; they stand out by default, because everything in its tradition is so unexperimental.
To clarify something, my use of the word "experimental", in this sense I would like to use a softer definition. As one might typically use it to mean "radical" or "delving into new, unheard of territory," I would like to use it in a more scientific sense. Not every scientific experiment is radical or life altering. Most are mundane: titration, say, or using a particle accelerator, oftentimes the results don't change the face of science. In fact, over the last century, only two major paradigm shifts have occurred (relativity and quantum mechanics) and while each revolution was carried on the backs of thousands of separate experiments, no one experiment necessarily defined the massive shifts in the way we think about the world, and millions more didn't contribute at all. All these other experiments were attempts to discover something a little new, a new fact, a small bit of information, and in this way is the way in which I believe The Microphones are experimental, and that being said, Mt. Eerie is their most experimental album yet.
While not being on the cusp of paradigmatic change for music, Mount Eerie does what it can to innovate and expand the accepted boundaries of indie pop, from the slow build-up of the first track - the distant foghorn and the percussive overdubs that empty out into a trickling piano and a horn blast, repeating for the first eleven minutes—to the interplay between lyrics and sound—the blast of atonal trumpets to accompany the narrator's mention of the word in the same song or the almost-Greek chorus and pounding bass that clearly evokes the terror of death, the narrating character, in "Mt. Eerie"—to the efficient marriage of minimalism and more typical psychedelic elements, e.g., the floating in and out of disparate sounds and backing choruses.
Overall though, this is interesting. It's fun to listen to; the more traditional songs are catchy, but above all, Mount Eerie holds you. There's a lot going on, a lot of interplay between the music and words, a coherent yet indirect story to discover, characters, themes, musical, and lyrical, that get repeated and twisted and sonically, exciting things to pay attention to. This might not change the face of independent music as a whole, but in the wake of this, indie pop has become even more of a dinosaur than it already was. Let's call this an asteroid.
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