Mount Eerie – Night Palace
★★★★☆
Released November 1st, 2024 on P.W. Elverum & Sun
Phil Elverum‘s work as Mount Eerie has for a long time now functioned basically as a form of diary making. They’re always sprawling meditations on whatever is on Elverum’s mind at any one given time, playing with form and function while adhering to a central theme, however loosely grasped. 2015’s Sauna, touted as the ‘ultimate’ Mount Eerie record, was about Zen and vikings, the transformative power of the sauna of the mind. Since then, however, Mount Eerie albums have been running in one gear, with more drone than diversity.
This is, of course, absolutely understandable. The Phil Elverum Story has been monochromatically tragic since 2017, when he released A Crow Looked At Me in the wake of the death of his partner, Geneviève Castrée. They had become parents, and then Castrée was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A year later she was dead. The process of her illness, Elverum’s dealing with grief, and his rebound marriage and subsequent divorce from actress Michelle Williams has been chronicled on A Crow Looked At Me, Now Only, and Lost Wisdom (Part 2), and to a lesser extent on the autobiographical final Microphones album, Microphones In 2020. It’s all been intense, searing lightning flaring across a dark night sky. Musically, it’s been a lot of folk drone, for the most part, though.
Night Palace changes that up. Mount Eerie runs on a diversity of instrumentation and sound here that Elverum hasn’t really explored in great detail since 2001’s classic Microphones album The Glow, Pt. 2. A lot of those old sounds find new homes here again, and the project is more refreshing for it. Many of the songs sound like actual rock songs, full of pounding drums, lo-fi distorted guitars, and moments of head-nodding glee. There are a couple of moments here and there where Elverum remembers that he flirted with black metal sounds once upon a time, like on 2003’s Mount Eerie, the penultimate Microphones record that found him switching over to his new project name. “Co-Owner of Trees” features a long, drawn-out feedback solo coda that puts Thurston Moore’s latter-day work to shame. Sauna may have been ‘the ultimate’ Mount Eerie record but Night Palace is something more – it’s a culmination of everything Elverum’s been doing for his entire career, all the lo-fi fuzz rock, experimentation, and, yes, drones that have characterized his entire body of work.
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