When Phil Elverum released A Crow Looked at Me in 2017 — a raw, dazzling and heartbreaking album that explored his partner Geneviève's passing and the cancer that took her — he ushered in a new era of Mount Eerie, one that gave him freedom to explore and experiment without compromise.
Over the next few years, he remarried (and amicably divorced), toured, raised his daughter and released two more acclaimed albums — Now Only (2018) and Lost Wisdom pt. 2 (2019). The irony of these works, particularly A Crow, was Elverum's simultaneous ability and inability to properly convey grief, frustration, exhaustion and solace. Death IS real, and it's NOT worth singing about, but he was determined to try, over and over again.
Now, after a five-year hiatus, Elverum is back with Night Palace, a dazzling avant-slacker masterwork that takes all the best parts of Eerie and the Microphones (his much-beloved early musical project, which he put to rest with Microphones in 2020) and blends it all into a swirling, sprawling, wind-swept musical experience.
Named after and born from the Joanne Kyger poem of the same name, the album opens with the title track, all fuzzy and pulsating, with Elverum's voice sing-speaking throughout, as if remembering his day, his whole life, before falling asleep. "I saw the lightning last night / But heard nothing," he sings, a forever incomplete image of fragmented melancholy. The world that surrounds Elverum, one that he's built for himself and Agathe, his daughter, permeates every note, every word, every sound. He talks to birds and contacts the spirit world, putting Agathe to bed and washing dishes. The song ends with the line, "And so what if no one ever finds this notebook," as if we're peeking, with unprecedented access and permission, into something we shouldn't be, even though the owner himself doesn't care what we find. The end-noise of "Night Palace" is immediately juxtaposed by the jangly procession of "Huge Fire," and therein lies the album's greatest strength.
As an artist, Elverum has inhabited many skins: soft-spoken singer-songwriter, destroyer of worlds (and microphones), black metal sage, broken troubadour, unabridged experimentalist and relentless self-scrutinizer, amongst a multitude of others. He is a man rooted in contrasts, and Night Palace is no different. There's the content of the songs themselves, where Elverum the Poet, who tries to write and express and synthesize all of life's grotesque wonders into song, struggles with Elverum the Pragmatist, preoccupied with the natural world and trying very hard to avoid hyperbole, metaphor, or any number of poetic devices. Then there's the sequencing, its very construction and structure, where sub-minute songs sit side by side with sprawling compositions, fragments grappling with tomes and vice versa.
The shorter tracks can be taken both as songs in and of themselves and as transitional interludes, splinters that contain a power all their own. "Broom of Wind," "Blurred World" and the crunchy "& Sun" are particular standouts, the latter a reflection on aging and the futility of "authenticity." It also features the most relatable line of the year: "I float in warm irrelevance."
The rousing first single "I Walk" features a searing, squelching solo and a minute description of Elverum's many walks. Mist and grass, fog and stones, generations and ideas all collect within his thoughts until the wind, prominent and cold, sweeps them all away. The skittering "Stone Woman Gives Birth to a Child at Night" is another highlight, with Elverum grappling with how complete and relevant he actually is. The track opens with the lines, "When I get back down to the truck with my backpack / I dig out my keys and here I am / Back in America," which will cut anyone who has ever dreamed of going back home to the quick.
Then there's the 12+ minute "Demolition," a minimalist spoken word piece that features the lightest of strumming, lots of wind, light tones and distant drum clicks and booms. Here, Elverum antagonizes and interrogates, questioning borders and trauma, misogyny and violence, dead-eyed corroborators and history, and his own writing, purpose and complicity. He tells of a meditation retreat where he felt a sense of peace, of relief, of sleep. It's a bit of a slog, which is probably the point, but it's also affecting, ending in a gorgeous rhetorical question that makes it all worthwhile: "Am I the ocean, or in it?"
While Night Palace is most certainly a double album, stretching just past the limits of CD technology (all real double albums are vinyl-bound anyway), it isn't some bloated, overwrought '70s throwback, fixated on a concept and devoured by its own pretension. Nevertheless, it still experiences some of the pitfalls of length, with certain songs feeling more like castaways that somehow washed on Elverum's bountiful Washingtonian shore, orphans wrapped in kelp that he rescued and resuscitated and included as a favour to the water.
Yet somehow, all of that becomes part of the album's charm: its cracks and fissures, its drawbacks and experiments and insta-classics, all of its restless ambition and sincerity and specificity. These are the things that make it a great album. It also includes what could very easily be pompous and hollow, but which comes across as earnest, unique, even exciting when presented through Elverum's capable board. The three part "animal suite," made up of "I Heard Whales (I Think)," "I Saw Another Bird" and "I Spoke with a Fish," is a truly beautiful stretch of music, mixing metaphor and imagery and dissonant soundscapes to examine Elverum's connection to, and separation from, the land he inhabits.
On "Whales," he records the sounds of lapping, crashing, disintegrating water while trying to decipher the subterranean noises he captures. Are they actually whales? An ancient shipwreck? Or just a hallucination with no explanation? The bird is a raven (the crow is long gone), and the fish is an auto-tuned stoner who digs Elverum's style while pretzeling his brain with the philosophy of matter and flow. Right on.
Throughout, Elverum grapples with the minutiae of everyday life, sometimes singing, sometimes reciting poetry, all of it concerned with the little things that enamour and frighten him: skipped inhalations on "Breaths"; playing with his daughter on "Wind & Fog"; the sky through a cardboard tube on the punky "Empty Paper Towel Roll." The view from his various windows comes up time and time again, a recurring motif of searching and looking and pondering. Thankfully, Elverum doesn't rely on cliches: these moments are not associated with some self-absorbed longing or pain, but simply with existing, with being in the moment, with looking out the window!
Much like Microphones in 2020, Night Palace also includes moments of self-reflection and throwback. There are parts that certainly, perhaps unconsciously, interpolate elements from some of his most well-known tracks ("Real Death," "Great Ghosts"), while his real life bleeds through every noisy, hushed beat. As someone who has loved and lost and loved and lost, Elverum keeps those who he loves most close by: Agathe writes and screams on the grinding "Swallowed Alive," while on "Blurred World," humming is provided by Geneviève, her voice reaching back from 2006 to join Phil in the present.
Ghosts run through Elverum's work, but they don't necessarily haunt or frighten. They seem to linger between notes and phrases, peeking and guiding while floating through his voice. The album, which was heavily inspired by Zen meditation, is indebted to its practice of calm. It's also fiercely political, with tracks about decolonization and backwoods protest mingling seamlessly with bird sounds and November rain. As Elverum himself has put it, the album's songs nestle two polarities: "Some zen, some Zinn."
Night Palace is an atmospheric, ambitious album by one of modern music's most open songwriters. Its length will certainly be a detriment for some, but those who allow themselves to be absorbed by the bubbling, crashing sounds contained therein will be rewarded with another beautiful, endlessly re-listenable collection of songs and sounds from Mount Eerie.
Phil Elverum continues to make and release albums that are fragile and bombastic, brilliant and fractured, visceral and brutal and obtuse. They are lost and found, ready and confused, here and there and everywhere, and will make you long for more DIY, more integrity, more Mount Eerie — 80 minutes is barely enough.