Art Without Art?

I am confronted with an aesthetic challenge this morning and I want to deal with it in the fairest manner possible. There is an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning titled ‘Lost Wisdom Pt. 2’ Review: From Personal Tragedy, an Artistic Triumph by Mark Richardson, their "rock and pop music critic." The review is of a new album by Phil Elverum. It is not so much the review that I find troublesome, but the album itself. Here is how Mark describes it:

Following the 2016 death of his wife, artist Geneviève Castrée, from cancer, which happened shortly after the birth of their first child, Mr. Elverum has used Mount Eerie as a platform for exploring loss and grief with an almost unbearable level of detail and intimacy. His 2017 album, “A Crow Looked at Me,” which focused exclusively on her passing and the wrenching aftermath, placed highly on many year-end polls and set the emotional tone for his subsequent releases. While it may sound like you need to know the details of Mr. Elverum’s story to appreciate his music, actually the opposite is true—the words he sings provide all the required information, and the songs stand on their own.

Now I have to say that this is a truly awful tragedy and since I have not experienced something so traumatic myself, I can only empathize. I have lost both my parents, but that was certainly not as piercingly painful as the tragedy of losing both wife and child in short succession. All that being acknowledged, now we have to listen to the music itself. The new album is not yet available, but the previous one A Crow Looked at Me is on YouTube with the lyrics. Let's listen:

I suppose when it comes to art and aesthetics I am something of a traditionalist. I wasn't born that way, it was something that evolved over quite a few years. There is a real internal tension I have that I suppose comes from two different psychological traits: one is openness to experience and the other is orderliness or conscientiousness. I am pretty strong in both these traits and relatively low in politeness and agreeableness. So when I work, on the one hand I am open to all the possibilities, but on the other hand, I have to transform these possibilities into something that has aesthetic coherence.

The problem I have with the music of Phil Elverum is that while it is painfully candid about his tragic experiences, it seems to me to lack the transformation into art. It is simply a man talking about his experience, but while that experience is communicated, it is not transformed or transfigured by art. I would like to know what a literary critic would say about the lyrics. For me, the music seems clumsy, amateurish, without any attempt to work with the music materials. All the songs have a dreary sameness. Oddly, they seem depressingly low-key. The poignancy of the lyrics is not reflected in the music. Whatever the words are saying, the accompaniment is the same fingerstyle folk guitar underneath a drooping melody with no direction. All this is rhythmically dull and lifeless.

Is this art? Well, not good art, certainly. What troubles me is that there is no attempt to make art out of personal experience, no interest in musical structure or aesthetics whatsoever. Bear in mind I am not trying to make an inappropriate comparison with songs by Schubert or Schumann. Not at all. But this is feeble compared to great song composers like Bob Dylan or Tom Waits who do create music with great musical character. There doesn't seem to be any of that here. The songs just begin and end randomly and there is no attempt to make each song have its own character.

What do my commentators think?