Another fascinating
Mount Eerie album,
Pre-Human Ideas collects electronic versions of songs from
Phil Elverum's pair of ambitious 2012 releases,
Clear Moon and
Ocean Roar, that began as instructional demos to help touring bands learn them. With the addition of new lyrics sung by Auto-Tuned vocals ranging from a rumbling bass to a fragile soprano, they allow
Elverum to play with some of his favorite themes -- mortality, the vastness of nature -- in ways that create thought-provoking tangents to the source material and are intriguing in their own right. More than just musical footnotes, these reworkings add extra depth to
Mount Eerie's already complex body of work.