"This is intense," Mount Eerie's Phil Elverum says near the end of the concert captured on (After), and it's an understatement if there ever were one: the only thing scarier -- and more cathartic -- than writing the songs about his late wife, Geneviève Castrée, that made up A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only would be performing them for a live audience. Recorded during Elverum's performance in a 13th century Gothic church as part of the 2017 Le Guess Who? festival, (After) is as powerful as the albums it draws from, and continues the evolution of these songs as layered expressions of grief, realization, and love. The Crow and Now Only material loses none of its immediacy in a live setting, yet the impact is different. Instead of the continuous flow of the studio albums, well-earned applause shields and separates each song here in much the same way (After)'s parentheses suggest intimacy and distance at the same time. Taking in each song as a discrete entity allows different moments to break listeners' hearts; the way Elverum notes "you did my remembering for me" on "Seaweed" is a small but particularly devastating example. The rapt silence of (After)'s audience surrounds and supports Elverum's performance in a truly remarkable way, as does the church's ambience -- "Crow, Pt. 2" sounds more ghostly, and more alive, as the echo blends his voice into his guitar. Similarly, the set list's balance of Crow's songs about immediate loss such as "Real Death" and "When I Take Out the Garbage at Night" and Now Only's reflections on its aftermath like "Distortion" and "Tintin in Tibet" (two of Elverum's most beautiful tributes to Castrée) only heightens the personal and the universal within all of these self-described "death songs." Simply put, (After) is another brave and beautiful document tracing how Elverum's sorrow and love continue to change shape. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi

1		Real Death
2		Seaweed
3		Ravens
4		When I Take Out the Garbage at Night
5		Emptiness, Pt. 2
6		Soria Moria
7		Crow
8		Distortion
9		Now Only
10		Crow, Pt. 2
11		remarks
12		Tintin in Tibet

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