Lionel Richie
Member
The Microphones – Microphones in 2020
“Microphones in 2020” serves as a long and detailed self-reflection and memoir on Phil Elverum’s entire life, just trying to find his way through the world. The song details
genius.com
I'm sure many here are familiar with the work of Phil Elverum, but just to make a proper introduction to this thread let me summarize his career. The Microphones is an indie folk project that dabbled in experimental music in the turn of the century and made two relevant albums called The Glow Pt 2 and Mount Eerie. While Phil has a very soft voice, the music has some bold influences and it's not your typical Pitchfork music. Then he went away with the Microphones name and started recording as Mount Eeerie, which led to some great works like the black metal influenced Wind's Poem and the grief masterpiece that is A Crow Looked at Me. Great music all around. He banged Michelle Williams, so you know he's a pro.
Flash forward to 2020, he revived the Microphones moniker and dropped an album long song called Microphones in 2020. The music is exactly 44 minutes and 44 seconds long and it's not like a prog rock suite that has multiple movements, it's legit a single song. So please keep in mind that this is 44 minutes of strumming guitar and a very gentle voice reciting the lyrics. That being said, the music has some interesting variations and instrumental flourishes. There's some slight tempo variations, some small changes here and there and seriously the instruments sound beautiful when they are used. The bass is crystal clear, the electric guitar sounds very shoegaze-y, there's even a piano here and there. Shit's good, but shit's sparse. The best equivalent would be ambient music. This is like an ambient folk song. I find it very interesting because the whole thing is incredibly subtle, but it may sound underwhelming to some. There are multiple passages in the middle that even sound a bit like a Tim Hecker song and Tim Hecker is an OG, so I'm sticking with my ambient folk definition.
What absolutely CAN'T be called underwhelming are the lyrics, which I posted above. It's a stream of consciousness narrative of his life with the project, retelling some passages of his life and mixing them with references to previous works. It's motherfucking wondrous, perhaps the best way to describe it would be a description of a liminal phase with no arrival. Makes sense in my head and man it's basically impossible to write about this album without waxing poetic so I'll stop here since english isn't my native language and I don't want to embarrass myself. It's really fucking good. You know Dopesmoker by Sleep? This is it, but extremely contemplative and even more abstract in the message.
So if you have 45 minutes to spare, give it a shot. It's my personal album of the year and by far the best thing I've heard since You Won't Get What You Want by Daughters. Do keep in mind, again, that this is a long ass folk song. But it's a fucking GOOD one.