Mount Eerie, St John on Bethnal Green, gig review: Beautiful art inspired by tragedy

Inside tonight’s venue, a modest 19th-century church in east London, songwriter Phil Elverum stands alone with a guitar and a microphone. Passing cars on the road outside cast gentle blue light through the stained glass windows and across the pews, and there is an imperturbable hush among those gathered to watch him. He plays and sings with such softness and space that you can hear the hum of his monitors as he does so.

In July last year, Elverum’s wife, the artist and musician Geneviève Castrée, died from pancreatic cancer. In the weeks and months that followed, as he continued to raise their baby daughter, Elverum wrote and recorded an album unlike any he had before, informed by a grief he’d never experienced before. In the past, under the monikers of Mount Eerie and The Microphones, Elverum’s music was layered and coarse, often overwhelming, but on A Crow Looked at Me, the music took a back seat, with poetic, acutely personal lyrics at the forefront.

It’s an album free of the grand metaphors we often use to draw sense from death. In fact, often Elverum doesn’t want to make any sense, and instead just stares at it, documenting it. “Death is real/ Someone’s there and then they’re not,” he sings tonight during “Real Death”. And then later, in the same song: “It’s dumb/ And I don’t want to learn anything from this/ I love you.”

It’s these moments, recounted in Elverum’s vulnerable, subdued tones, that hit hardest. Themes of loss and despair are nothing new to his work, but as he admits on “Emptiness, Pt. 2”: “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about/ Back before I knew my way around these hospitals”. It’s one of those lines that steals the breath from your lungs.

Understandably, Elverum seems exhausted between songs, rubbing his eyes before looking back out into the crowd. But there are moments of relief. On the sprawling “Soria Moria” he remembers flying back from Norway to meet Geneviève for the first time, and their instant endearment – as he does so, he seems to almost crack a smile. And in one of the newly written, unreleased songs he performs tonight, he talks about the dark absurdity of performing these “death songs” to drugged-up festival-goers in the Phoenix desert, which raises a laugh from the audience.

Those new songs are very much an extension of A Crow Looked at Me, full of the plaintive daily details, like sobbing over fried eggs while he listens with his daughter to one of his wife’s old records. He clearly has a lot still to write down about this – he’ll probably never run out.

As the gig finishes and we file out, Elverum returns to the merch stand by the exit. He’s approached by a fan asking for a hug. Elverum obliges and then wordlessly nods back at the fan. It’s hard to know how to approach something like this as a fan, and likewise a critic – it feels weird giving a star rating to another human's honest and unshrinking account of loss. But it’s impossible not to feel moved by the beauty of the art that has arisen from such tragedy, and to be grateful Elverum wants to share it with us.