Phil Elverum’s music, just like the old-growth forests the place the Washington songwriter has discovered work of late, is outlined by cycles of destruction and rebirth. The primary main rupture got here when he blew up the Microphones after 2003’s Mount Eerie and took the album’s identify as a brand new alias; the second got here after the demise of his associate, Geneviève, in 2016, on a sequence of austere albums that reckoned together with his youthful self’s poetic remedy of impermanence. Elverum’s monumental new Mount Eerie album Night time Palace feels each like a 3rd definitive rupture and a end result of his work over the previous 25 years. Its 81-minute embrace finds room for all the sooner Elverums: the Zen poet, the stark realist, the black-metal shaman, the child tinkering with recording gear within the again room of The Enterprise in Anacortes and instructing himself methods to convey the sounds in his head to life.
It additionally solutions the query of whether or not he’d ever once more make an epic like his early masterpiece The Glow, Pt. 2, steeped in pure imagery and beneficiant with studio trickery. After a run of stripped-down information the place “all poetry is dumb” was a mantra, it’s a reduction to listen to an album the place he actually recites poetry twice—and in addition talks to a fish, which responds in a well-known stoner drawl. Night time Palace embraces a few of the greatest vistas and most luxurious imagery of any album he’s ever made. But the songwriting voice is distinctly that of the post-A Crow Checked out Me Elverum, all the time questioning his personal artwork and assumptions, awed by the pure world however cautious of assigning metaphorical significance to it. At 46, he’s nonetheless attempting to elucidate what the lengthy tune he’s been singing for his complete profession actually means.
At 26 tracks simply barely topping the capability of a single CD, Night time Palace is a double album by any definition, not least within the classic-rock sense, and the messy however truthful sprawl that suggests. The primary disc comprises a few of the loveliest songs Phil Elverum has ever written. “Broom of Wind” is an ideal miniature, as concise because the Joanne Kyger poem that offers the album its identify, set to astonishing celestial baroque pop and over in 99 seconds; he instantly outdoes himself with “I Stroll,” a type of numinous ballads he does higher than simply about anybody else in indie rock. “Blurred World” is a vignette of contentment, set throughout a midnight piss, that lets a little bit of MJ Lenderman’s shaggy-dog humor into Elverum’s universe. “Empty Paper Towel Roll,” “I Noticed One other Chicken” and seasick-sounding early spotlight “Large Hearth” proceed from the identical scrappy live-band sound he explored on 2015’s Sauna, the final album he put out earlier than Geneviève’s demise.
