Album Of The Week: Mount Eerie Night Palace

Winter in Northwest Washington’s temperate San Juan Islands may not be the freezing, brutal onslaught faced by comparable latitudes further inland, but four months of uninterrupted wind, rain, and minimal daylight can be a taxing monotony. Locals yearn for the summer, whose balmy lack of rain remains a well-kept secret. For tourists, the region may as well not exist from October to June.

Recently relocated from his native Anacortes to the nearby, but more remote Orcas Island, Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum spends his new album finding unlikely solace in those dark, lonely months. “I live year-round in a vacation place,” he sings on the cheekily titled “November Rain.” “I love the winter wind in my face.”

Elverum made his name with a handful of early 2000s albums released as the Microphones. Despite the far lengthier tenure and more diverse output of Mount Eerie (the moniker Elverum adopted in 2003), he retains the reputation of the starry-eyed kid whose studio experiments and nature imagery offered mystical depictions of his homeland.

In recent years, the now-46-year-old Elverum has explicitly distanced himself from the material that continues to attract his most cultish following, chiefly 2001’s The Glow Pt. 2. When his partner, Geneviève Castrée, died in 2016 shortly after the birth of their first child, he responded with the stark, diaristic A Crow Looked At Me. Elverum momentarily resurrected his original moniker for Microphones In 2020, a 45-minute-long song/album that examined vivid snippets of his youth in an attempt to explain why nature-driven musings no longer moved him. “For a while I tried to reject my life’s work,” he writes in Night Palace’s bio, “I thought it was perverse to seek understanding and create beauty out of the ambiguities.”

Whereas Microphones In 2020 mined Elverum’s past in service of a dense lyrical explanation of his current mindset, Night Palace treats the entirety of his 25-year discography as a sonic painter’s palette, rendering it his most eclectic album to date. If you only love one specific Microphones or Mount Eerie era, there’s something here for you; if you’re an Elverum obsessive, this is a career-spanning opus.

The opening title track, a noisy-yet-melodic smear reminiscent of 2005’s No Flashlight, slowly parts the curtains on Night Palace’s nocturnal tableau. The much more concrete “Huge Fire” follows, calling back to the doomy rock DNA that coursed through 2009’s Wind’s Poem and 2015’s Sauna. Over the next three brief songs, Elverum deftly pivots from knotty abstraction (“Breaths”) to hair-raising black metal (“Swallowed Alive”) to the sweetest, most earnest acoustic song he’s laid down since The Glow Pt. 2 (“Canopy”). The wildly varied character of those first 15 minutes continues throughout Night Palace’s 26 songs and 80-minute runtime.

With callbacks to long-dormant musical modes come the trees, water, and landscape-centric lyrics that seemed unlikely to ever return. Since moving to Orcas, Elverum has gone against type by not immediately, reflexively making sense of his new surroundings via song, and Night Palace reveals a pent-up wealth of poignant observations. He’s tromping through his overgrown property, hacking away at branches to fuel bonfires, reveling in solitary trips to the rocky coastline, and above all else, pondering the slight intricacies and boundless depths of the sky and the weather. Elverum’s younger self would have used these environmental features as mystical props or thinly veiled guises for youthful horniness, but now he incorporates his singular vision into a deeper philosophy. On “Empty Paper Towel Roll,” he looks through the titular device and finds a parallel to his “narrow tunnel vision.” As he squints upwards, he wonders, “Can I abandon this position/ See beyond my little life?”

Night Palace’s music and vivid scenery clearly hearken back to pre-A Crow Looked At Me days, but the meta-narrative approach that has defined Elverum’s last decade persists. In a way, his discography has always felt like a living entity of its own, thanks to a penchant for self-reference and boundless alternate versions of existing material, but lately he’s scrubbed out any trace of opacity from his work. Night Palace has more set dressing, but at its heart lie Elverum’s deepest self-examinations to date.

The album might initially scan as aimless, given its jarring transitions between Elverum’s softest, weirdest, catchiest, and most abrasive sounds, as well as omnivorous lyrics that contrast with the focused specificity that has defined his last three releases. A Crow Looked At Me, Now Only, and Microphones In 2020 announced their intentions with no subterfuge; Night Palace patiently comes into focus as it progresses. The first half’s renewed emphasis on the physical world is imbued with a probing, self-aware tone that bears the weight of Elverum’s lived experience — loss, aging, single parenthood, spiritualism — and it’s intriguing enough on its own. But 40 minutes into this engrossing navel-gazing reverie comes a track called “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization.”

Here, Night Palace’s tone doesn’t shift so much as it reveals an underlying wrinkle. Elverum’s music has never been explicitly political — although his clear reverence for nature and DIY culture has never been difficult to extrapolate into a broader worldview — but he spends this album’s back half confronting socio-economic, historical, and racial issues with the same level of intensity that A Crow Looked At Me addressed death. In the bio, Elverum characterizes Night Palace as “some Zen, some Zinn,” and this snaps into focus on “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization.” As its title suggests, Elverum’s principle concern is this country’s legacy of genocide and subjugation of Indigenous Peoples:

Now we live in the wreckage of a colonizing force
Whose racist poison still flows
So scared of a moment of discomfort now
We turn away from the obvious:
All we have is stolen and can’t be owned

This mission statement expands into a critique of the way the San Juan Islands, once inhabited by various Coast Salish nations, have become summer vacation destinations for the wealthy. Not only is this stolen land, Elverum observes, but it’s also dominated by luxury homes that lie vacant for the majority of the year. “I can see the lights of the unoccupied second homes/ That they keep lit up for no reason,” he sings on “November Rain,” before asking, “Don’t they realize all our stolen wealth/ Is built on screaming bones?”

Despite his modest upbringing, Elverum is quick to acknowledge his complicity. He opens the very next song, the shaggy rocker “Co-Owner Of Trees,” with a succinct career bio that makes even the modest life of an ethical indie musician sound slightly absurd:

I wrote down some ideas
I made some records
I sold some records
I got money
I spent the money
to buy some land
I own land
I feel funny

Night Palace’s loving reevaluation of the Microphones’ and Mount Eerie’s 2000s material is obvious from the jump, but Elverum solidifies his newly evolved opinion of his early work on the final three tracks. “Stone Woman Gives Birth To A Child At Night” is one of four songs that he wrote in one day during a camping trip in the North Cascades in August 2022, a fruitful session that feels like the genesis of the album’s themes. Perhaps this majestic isolation reminded him why he spent the bulk of his career enamored with Northwest Washington’s natural beauty. On “Stone Woman…,” he sings:

I never meant to pretend there’s another world
Apart from this one we’re in
But I was briefly adrift in a night sky
Before being re-immersed in this endless et cetera

The 12-minute-long, spoken-word “Demolition” is a more granular analysis of Elverum’s relationship with his new home. “I used to dream that my roots were strong and deep,” he says, referencing a beloved Glow Pt. 2 track, “Then I dug down just barely and found cathedrals/ Here: a long guest in someone else’s home.”

Closer “I Need New Eyes” was written during a return trip to the North Cascades almost exactly a year later. It is Night Palace’s obvious conclusion, a thesis-in-reverse in which Elverum investigates his initial outlook much more honestly and empathetically than the “I was young and naïve” disownment that has lurked throughout his last three albums. “I just wanted to say something true/ And complicate my youth,” he sings, before explaining how his view has shifted due to maturation, tragedy, and a concerted effort to acknowledge the diabolical forces that created and continue to impact his surroundings.

Great albums don’t have to justify themselves against political climates or their creator’s previous work, and albums are not inherently great because they do so. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election and the COVID pandemic, too many musicians acted upon an urge to put the country’s dire issues on their backs, and while that may have garnered praise in the short-term, it rarely elevated the art into something that retains resonance. In the same timeframe, there’s been a rise in self-reference and fan service, most obviously in a mainstream film landscape that has become reliant on hollow resurrections of existing IP, but also in a decimated live music economy where reunions and anniversary-pegged album playthroughs have become the only sure payday.

Is Elverum’s on-record political consciousness less cringeworthy than Idles’ Joy As An Act Of Resistance? Is his invocation of “My Roots Are Strong and Deep” that different from Alien: Romulus shoehorning in the iconic “Get away from her, you bitch!” line from Aliens? Your answer may depend on how deeply you care about Mount Eerie, but personally I think Night Palace avoids the pitfalls of these now-commonplace tactics. For Elverum, they’re uphill battles rather than opportunistic tie-ins. Night Palace is hell-bent on mindful retrospection, and it’s Elverum’s restless creativity that keeps it afloat under the weight of its ambitious intentions.

There are surprises both charming and arresting around every corner of Night Palace, and I’ve barely touched on two-thirds of its songs. While leaving a wealth of analysis on the table, I’d like to close by singling out “I Spoke With A Fish,” perhaps the weirdest and silliest song on the album. Elverum wrote it on the same 2022 camping trip that birthed the most incendiary big-picture critiques of his career, but here, he’s just trying to see the world through the eyes of a fish. The premise seems as absurd as the song’s trap hi-hats and closing Big Lebowski soundbite, but Elverum’s perspective shift yields profound results. The river housing the fish is no more fluid than the surrounding mountains that jut up and crumble down over millennia — slowly, but never stagnantly. “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall.”

Elverum’s eagerness to incorporate even the most inconsequential animal sighting into his ever-evolving philosophy explains why his music remains spellbinding years after he first achieved transcendence. There’s no end.

Night Palace is out 11/1 on P.W. Elverum & Sun.