Remember Mount Eerie?

As the obligatory year-end lists roll in from around the music world, there's one artist who is conspicuously absent from almost every ranking of the best of 2012: Pacific Northwest songwriter Phil Elverum and his project Mount Eerie.

The fact that Mount Eerie is being overlooked in these retrospective roundups seems particularly cruel given that he released two of the year's most mind-blowing albums: Clear Moon, which came out in May, and Ocean Roar, which followed in September.

These companion pieces were recorded at Elverum's personal studio in a converted church in his hometown of Anacortes, WA. The town, according to Wikipedia, has a population of less than 16,000, meaning that it's a far cry from major music hubs like Brooklyn, Montreal or Los Angeles.

I've never actually been to Anacortes (until a couple of years ago, I had never even heard of it)‚ but I imagine it's a sleepy place -- picturesque, but lacking the bustling musical climate that most songwriters need to thrive. Can you imagine trying to build a fan base in a town too small to support a music scene, or attempting to hone your live chops without an array of venues and nightclubs to perform at?

Small-town life seems to work just fine for Elverum, however, since the 19 tracks that make up these albums are steeped in quiet reflection and rich natural imagery. Clear Moon opener "Through the Trees pt. 2" sets a tranquil mood with layered acoustic guitars and pattering percussion, and Elverum whispers with quiet reverence about the "breathing sky" and "the gleaming stone of the moon in the sky at noon."

It's both gorgeously peaceful and completely fucking terrifying, since he drops an existential bombshell by singing, "I meant all my songs not as a picture of the woods / But just to remind myself that I briefly live." This is the price of communion with nature: the constant reminder that all life is temporary and that death is everywhere.

The rest of Clear Moon is similarly meditative. The title track pairs dark drones with choral remembrances of a "clear moon in the black sky," while the pillowy "Yawning Sky" is a sublime blend of keyboards and cavernous guitar.

Ocean Roar, on the other hand, finds the world shrouded by a thick blanket of fog. Opening cut "Pale Lights" is ten minutes of stormy psych and barely-there vocals, while the two lengthy instrumental tracks are doused in waves of distortion and stoner metal haze.

The album has moments of calm, most notably the sparse and chilly "I Walked Home Beholding," which begins with a gorgeously evocative image: "The world was frozen / I left the studio / The whole town had been abandoned except for me." For the most part, however, Ocean Roar is bleak and frightening, but no less stunning than Clear Moon.

So while the rest of the music world fawns over the ultra-trendy sounds of Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean (no disrespect to those guys -- the Lamar album in particular is fantastic), let's not forget the small-town guy whose albums brilliantly captured the turbulent environment of the Pacific Northwest.

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Dear readers, you may notice that comments are not enabled for this story. In what has become a Tyee tradition, we're closing the commenting system for the holidays. Thanks for all the insightful and informative comments in 2012. We look forward with happy anticipation to more of the same in 2013.