Mount Eerie Haunts the Market Hotel

Halloween in New York is a circus. Like any typical weekend in the city, people are loud, drunk, high, invasive of your personal space, and looking to get laid. But unlike most weekends, those people are dressed like zombies or chickens or dead Michael Jacksons, on the hunt for even more gratuitous sex. No one's safe on these Bacchanalian streets, and don't even think of getting out of a Halloween party, dignity intact. So what better way to spend the holiday hulled up away from it all in Bushwick's Market Hotel, listening to black metal? Mount Eerie provided the perfect creepy soundtrack to the most fucked up day of the year.

The ever-reclusive Phil Elverum, the brains behind Mount Eerie, has traded his solitary acoustic creations for bombast: onstage, two drummers (one pounded on a gong) and two keyboardists helped Elverum recreate the surprising heaviness of Mount Eerie's 2009 album, Wind's Poem. The set began in the same way the album does: with several minutes of purely static noise. Elverum arched his neck upwards toward the broken plaster of Market Hotel's ceiling, his eyes closed as the distortion from his guitar filled the space. "Oh, the voice of wind," he sang. "I see flames in common life/I hear the wind's dark poem." The room trembled with the sound. 


Elverum looked comfortable as a band leader, if not a little cramped on the venue's small performance space. He stood between his two keyboard players, in front of his two drummers, and transfixed his eyes on the audience, not thrashing, never raising his voice above a hushed whisper, but visibly affect by the music's intensity. He shook and sweat as the noise bounced off the walls.

The only thing lazy about Mount Eerie's performance was the costumes. The Twin Peaks theme throughout Wind's Poem gave us high expectations: would Elverum dress up as Agent Cooper or Bob? Neither. He wore a black shirt with a fake arrow sticking out of his chest. Still, when the the band began playing "Between Two Mysteries," one of the best songs of 2009, which borrows its melody directly from "Laura Palmer's Theme Music" off of the Twin Peaks soundtrack, they may as well have been dressed like the series' cast.
 
"And the songs fade," Elverum sang, "and the singers die. But my heart will not stop thumping. The shapes in the dark still look convincing." It was the creepiest moment of the evening--and its cleverly lifted tune only added to its affect. The venue no longer feltl like a refuge. It was time to go back to the unsafe streets anyway, every person fending for himself, in costume.