Mount Eerie Re-Engages with the World on Night Palace
Phil Elverum seems to have made peace with impermanence on his latest, a sprawling 26-track double album.
For someone whose life has recently gone in a rather austere direction, Phil Elverum has a lot to say on Night Palace. It’s his first album as Mount Eerie since 2019, and the idea of making music often receded into the background in the intervening years, particularly after the one-album revival of his previous project, the Microphones, in 2020.
Instead, Elverum directed his energy toward building a house and what he has called “basic forest maintenance” on a parcel of land on Orcas Island, Washington, where he moved with his young daughter after Elverum’s brief marriage to the actress Michelle Williams fell apart in 2019. All those hours alone in the woods have afforded Elverum plenty of time to think, and the universe has given him a lot to reflect on: the 2016 death of his first wife from pancreatic cancer, raising their daughter on his own from the time she was about 16 months old, the rise and fall of his romance with Williams, the start of a subsequent relationship. No one wants to dwell on the misfortunes that have befallen Elverum, but the past decade of his life is there on Night Palace, a mammoth 26-track double-album that stretches past 80 minutes in length.
It’s there, but also, it’s not. Elverum is oblique about the emotional tumult he has experienced over the past decade, which exists here in the elisions and allusions of lyrics that concern themselves with nature, and his place within it. He sings of rain, snow, wind and fog, and describes the “shattered wood” he drags into bonfires, where it slowly disintegrates into embers and ash. Such imagery comes as Elverum narrates vignettes from his daily existence, as if he’s documenting an ongoing conversation with himself, often in a way that feels unfiltered. That’s not to say it is unexamined. On the contrary, Elverum over the past few years has become a regular practitioner of meditation, which emphasizes mindfulness. His daily routine has perhaps brought him a greater sense of equanimity about the nature of impermanence—a subject in which he is well-versed.