Mount Eerie’s Night Palace: a birdwatcher’s poetry.
Phil Elverum, one of the most profound musical minds of the 2000s, returns with an album that exudes humanity in a reflective manner.
Seven years have passed since the release of Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked At Me, an album that has appeared on countless “saddest albums ever made” lists due to its intimate songwriting surrounding the untimely death of frontman and songwriter Phil Elverum’s wife. It’s an album that gives the listener a window into genuine human despair without any of the fancy frills that often come with contemporary recorded music. To preserve his message, Elverum opted for an album composed of purely guitar, bass, minor percussive elements and raw vocals, unfiltered both in its grief and audio effects.
Night Palace, Mount Eerie’s most recent release, carries with it a different tone. Its message is a broader statement on nature as an untouchable force, and Elverum tells this story through the sheer variety in the album’s instrumentation. While A Crow Looked At Me reflects spent with the love of one’s life before the bitter end, Night Palace evokes the imagery of planting your bare feet in untouched soil, and it feels like the product of a since-evolved mind. It’s a personal statement rather than a eulogy, a testament to Elverum’s acute awareness of his surroundings.
To match this sentiment, Elverum allows the instrumentation to spread its wings and reach heights that weren’t realized on A Crow Looked At Me. In its runtime of an hour and twenty minutes, the album spans the gamut of musical genres, with track lengths ranging from one to twelve minutes. This volume allows for moments of meditative plucks, indie rock and even unmistakable thrash metal on “Swallowed Alive,” in which Elverum’s screams and the frantic smashing of drums melt together into an unnerving pool of noise. The variation of Night Palace, combined with the consistency of Elverum’s touching vocal performances, is a recipe for genuine engagement. The album as a unit sounds impossible in the contemporary music sphere—it's practically incomparable to any other project.
Elverum’s inclusion of electronic elements, sampling and demo-like production creates a musical simulacrum that resembles a marriage of modern-day humanity and the natural world. Ironically, many of these moments on the record appear in songs where Elverum is observing or speaking to animals, a common thread woven across its runtime. Amidst twinkling guitars, “I Spoke With A Fish,” incorporates glimpses of trap drums and panned autotune before resolving into a wall of voices that hum in harmony, a moment that made me stop in my tracks to make sure my AirPods were working correctly on my first listen. The two “Wind & Fog” songs show this radical variation in a microcosm both instrumentally and lyrically. The pumping harmonic noise and occasional obtuse synth paired with Elverum’s lowest vocal register on “Wind & Fog, Pt. 2” create a stark yet complementary contrast to the heavy garage rock-esque stylings of “Wind & Fog.” The gentle “I Heard Whales (I Think)” begins with soft guitar strums and sweeping piano chords before being overcome with static; after a minute, it once again returns to chords that ascend along with Elverum’s voice, who sings about music emanating from non-human sources, most notably whales.
Inhuman beauty is one of the central lyrical themes of Night Palace. The album’s lyrics are most often observations of immediate nature adorned with flowery language, making Elverum’s vision of his serene surroundings feel all the more distant and ethereal. In “I Saw Another Bird,” a song whose title might recall the imagery of A Crow Looked At Me, Elverum remarks on the unknowable conversations of ravens above him. Their chatter evokes a reaction of quiet contemplation despite his thought that these birds might be speaking directly to him. This rock cut was the third single released before the album’s release, and its rough, distorted guitars provide an unusually bright foundation for Elverum’s melodic hums. The second single, entitled “I Walk,” is one of the album’s centerpieces and gives us samples of the sheer versatility of several of the record’s sound palettes. Shimmering guitars, soft analog synths, and quiet drumming eventually build to soaring, abrasive guitar solos that dominate the mix. This intensity complements Elverum’s lyrics that imagine civilization melting into the mist as he walks through the wild.
The most lyrically involved song on the project is the penultimate track “Demolition.” Throughout its staggering twelve-minute runtime, strange metallic rings, wind and the methodical, warlike pounding of drums set an atmospheric backdrop for what feels like a theatrical monologue. Elverum delivers a titanic speech pondering aspects of his life and the grim state of “the human world.” The track acts like a guided meditation in terms of his spoken-word delivery combined with its ambient backing:
I sing my little songs in a burning time of nature
And woman-denying authoritarian landlords
Of numbed-out spectators glazing over genocides
Privileged and healthy for the moment while seas rise.
It’s a refreshing awareness of one’s place in a brutal world, and it’s nothing short of beautiful.
The crux of Night Palace’s message is in how it appreciates the teeming natural world, free of mankind’s claim, while understanding the need to acknowledge the pain we have inflicted on our environment so that healing can begin. Mount Eerie’s latest effort is a breath of fresh air in a culture of standardized production, and it has me constantly returning to it due to its immense scale and consistently impactful songwriting. Elverum is uniquely unafraid of genre-based expectations and retains an incredible ability to tailor a powerful message to a completely original sound. There’s no artist I find as consistently surprising, compelling and thoughtful as Mount Eerie, and I look eagerly forward to whatever new tricks he has up his flannel sleeves.
edited by Alia Smith.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.