Phil Elverum said his new album was meant to be colossal. It’s as colossal as his previous records, but that’s the problem - it’s nothing new. The crashing cymbals, nature imagery, and droning are present, just as they are on any Elverum release. He also said he wanted Wind’s Poem to be like black metal, and it is probably the first release in the genre to be related to nature poetry: Elverum rhapsodizes about water, rocks, the forest, brooks. Yet the most interesting of the songs is “Between Two Mysteries,” which sounds like he’s playing a jam jar as an instrument. To be fair, he did manage to do one thing that took me by surprise: he removed the melody and intimacy of his previous works. - Evan Tokarz