A Crow Looked at Me

Well, Elverum clearly needed to vent this stuff and to share it with the wider world and you’re unlikely to find a more powerfully eulogistic record released this year. Arguably ever.

A Crow Looked at Me is a masterpiece in the manner of A Grief Observed and “She Will Find What is Lost”. All of these works create a special communion between creator and observer, artistic experiences that join individual circumstances of loss with whatever the listener/reader/viewer brings to the work.

They are beautifully and simply arranged, but it is not an entertaining album to listen to in any conventional sense, nor can it be shaken off easily. It is, however, the kind of album that makes all others seem frivolous while you’re hearing it.

Pain is the crux of Elverum’s career, and without resorting to any of his brutally stark instrumentation, he offers his most sobering full-length to date, and likely of all time.

A Crow Looked at Me stands as a remarkable example of the restorative power of music, an intimate display of love, daring both in concept and execution.

So simple, so tactile, so deceptively real are these songs. Their cumulative effect is that they become wobbly with metaphor, forcing the listener into the kind of magical thinking that transforms everything in the living world into a sign of the dead, only to snap back into a reality that for better and worse means nothing.

It may not be one you play often, but it's also one you will never forget. It's omnipresent. Words fail.

A Crow Looked at Me is what all art should aspire to be: honest, affecting, and unforgettable.

There is sad music, which is to say music that deploys lyrical or musical motifs meant to connote misery. And then there is this album, which mostly exists in a space beyond those concerns. It is an album because a musician made it and it is broken up into songs, but it is also a diary, a balled-up tissue, found art.

This record possesses immense power to make listeners reflect on their own relationships and mortality.

Overwhelming and beautiful. [May 2017, p.35]

For anyone who was ever remotely interested in Mount Eerie or the Microphones, A Crow Looked at Me is a must-listen. But it feels made for a very specific time and place, and the subject matter is tough to stomach and tougher to shake.

Painfully literal in its detailing of grief. [Jul 2017, p.91]

This is a remarkably powerful and pure album.

A Crow Looked At Me is an unsettling, awkward listen and it might (probably will) make you cry. It’s also a tribute to an amazing 13-year love story (the penultimate song Soria Moria encompasses Elverum’s childhood longing, how he met Castrée and their instant connection) and may turn out to be one of the strongest albums of the year.

As cathartic as the creation of A Crow Looked at Me might have been for this artist, we're obviously meeting him early in the soul-testing climb of this story's arc.