On A Crow Looked at Me, Mount Eerie's Phil Elverum masterfully described how the death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, changed him. On its follow-up, he expresses how his grief is changing -- whether he wants it to or not -- with just as much skill and tenderness. Written shortly after Crow's release, Now Only finds him mourning the fading of that intense sorrow even as he and his daughter look to what comes next. Elverum tailors his approach in subtle, fitting ways: this album isn't quite as devastatingly sad as its predecessor, and on songs such as "Crow, Pt. 2," there's a lightness when he sings "you're a quiet echo on a loud wind" that wasn't there before. While Elverum maintains A Crow Looked at Me's stripped-down, vérité style of singing and playing, his artistry is more apparent on Now Only. If possible, his use of sound is even more evocative. On "Tintin in Tibet," he sets the flashbacks to how he and Castrée met to floating fingerpicking that's in sharp contrast to the simple downstrokes of the song's present. He also gives the free-flowing storytelling that's always been a hallmark of Mount Eerie -- and A Crow Looked at Me in particular -- a little more structure, with longer tracks that reflect how the world reassembles itself into more recognizable forms once immediate loss passes. On the title track, he even grounds a stream of moments -- waiting in the hospital prior to Castrée's death, playing a festival with Skrillex -- with an honest-to-goodness chorus. Here and on "Distortion," an 11-minute song that spans the first dead body Elverum ever saw, a pregnancy scare, and a Jack Kerouac documentary without ever losing its emotional focus, his gift at connecting the now to the eternal remains unparalleled. Likewise, the ways he explores how the act of remembering Castrée reshapes his grief are equally touching and insightful. "I don't want to live with this feeling any longer than I have to/But I also don't want you to be gone," he sings on "Earth," where the lines between decay and rebirth blur as Castrée's remains resurface in the garden and meld with animal bones on a mountaintop. He confronts the transformation of loss into art -- and into letting go -- more directly on Now Only's emotional hinge, "Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup," where he lets his wife "recede into the paintings." Like A Crow Looked at Me, Only Now overflows with love, but Elverum never romanticizes death. Instead, he vividly captures the nuances of grief, absurdity, and hope as he and his daughter leave the "blast zone" immediately after Castrée's passing, and that makes Only Now a remarkable portrait of loss -- and growth. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi

1		Tintin In Tibet
2		Distortion
3		Now Only
4		Earth
5		Two Paintings By Nikolai Astrup
6		Crow, Pt. 2