What’s more primal than singing to the dead? “I sing to you, Geneviève / I sing to you / You don’t exist / I sing to you, though”: So begins Now Only, the ninth album that Phil Elverum, the 39-year-old multi-instrumentalist, has recorded under the name Mount Eerie. Geneviève did exist, once, as Geneviève Gosselin, and then as Geneviève Castrée, an accomplished artist and musician, and finally as Geneviève Elverum, before her death in 2016, at age 35, from pancreatic cancer; she was diagnosed just four months after the couple’s only daughter was born. Death changes things for the living left behind, and though that’s an easy observation to make, it’s much harder to live with, there in the aftermath when everything’s changed.
Now Only is remarkable for many reasons,…
