Written by Jason Marecki
I’ll start this off with a disclaimer that I am a huge Phil Elverum fan and there’s nothing that’s gonna change that. The score at the end of this review will be a 10 and if you disagree with that you can suck an egg.
Night Palace is the 15th album from Washington-based band Mount Eerie, headed by frontman Phil Elverum. Standing at a hefty 81 minutes and 26 songs, it’s one of his most expansive and far-reaching projects to date. Elverum sprinkles musical styles from all across his discography. A dash of drone here, a splash of spoken-word poetry, and a teaspoon of 808s and a Big Lebowski sample and you’ve got yourself a Night Palace chicken parmesan baby.
On my many repeat listens, I’ve started to separate the album into 3 distinct parts. The first part runs from the first song, “Night Palace”, to the seventh song “I Walk”. In this part, we see Elverum’s personal journey being swallowed alive by the world without his late wife, Geneviève Castrée. He struggles with raising his daughter by himself, he often disassociates from reality, and he’s overwhelmed by his own breathing. There is no peace for Elverum here. The only way he can make it through this nightmare is to trudge on through it. His daughter’s voice breaks through on the fourth track, “Swallowed Alive”, reminding him and us that “You get swallowed by the lion / swallowed alive / and live to tell the tale.” The first part of the album ends with “I Walk”. Elverum walks into nature, letting his obligations, worries, hopes, everything fall off his body until he dissipates into mist. He’s begun his journey through the natural world, seeing the world for what it truly is.
The second part begins with the eight song “(soft air)” and ends with the fifteenth song “I Spoke With A Fish”. Elverum begins his journey through the natural world by letting it push itself into his lungs. He has no choice but to accept his appointment from nature. He moves around the world, aimless, but free. As Tolkien said in that book for nerds, “Not all those who wander are lost.” Images of breathing and the wind blowing are hugely important to this part of the album. The natural world continually forces Elverum to keep walking throughout his journey, pushing him with the wind, or its breath.
I want to focus on the last song of the second part, “I Spoke With A Fish”. Stylistically, it’s one of Elverum’s most out there songs, and it’s a stand out of the album. Elverum approaches a fish, trying to impose his worldview on it. He tells it the world of the river the fish lives in is just that, a river. However, The Fish fights back. The Fish rebuts with his point that the mountains Elverum lives around are more than that, they are “flowing matter”. It’s important to note here that 808s begin rattling during The Fish’s rebuttal, and his voice is doubled over with one track having a layer of autotune on top of it.
Elverum accepts the rebuttal and takes another look at the mountain. He finally sees the world for what it is, an ever-changing, churning mass repeatedly falling back in on itself. He returns to the fish with a new perspective. He compliments the fish telling him,“I like how you move through the water as one flowing muscle.” The fish responds simply with a line sampled from The Big Lebowski,“I dig your style too man.” The natural world has accepted who Elverum isnow. His journey is only halfway complete, the journey back home just beginning. It’s a beautifully weird cap to this part of the album.
The third and final part runs from the sixteenth song “Myths Come True” to the twenty sixth and final song “I Need New Eyes”. This part is a little more disconnected than the others, but it makes sense stylistically. This part is all about decay and loss, a theme all too common in Elverum’s real life. Beginning with “Myths Come True”, Elverum finally makes it home. However, he sees the world tainted by “Technology, metal, an abandoned FedEx truck”. The “civilized” world is not the one he aimlessly wandered for years, it is one of decay and discarded trash. This theme of civilization’s decay continues into the next song “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization”. The “colonizing force” of western civilization has turned the world as we know it into a wasteland, furthering the image built on before it. Elverum specifically calls out America as a perpetrator of such destruction, calling for its death, or at least the death of the idea of “America”.
Elverum is not a stranger to calling out specific parties he believes are poisoning the world on this record. In the next two songs, “November Rain” and “Co-Owner of Trees”, he attacks absentee landowners and the idea of owning property at all. Once again, he is steered in the right direction by the wind: “Nothing’s mine, I draw a line / A wind blows and says, ‘Nice try’” despite the discomfort Elverum feels for discarding all previous notions about ownership or property or what is “his”, the wind will not let him give up.
The final 7 songs, “Myths Come True, Pt. 2” to “I Need New Eyes” point the decay inwards. Elverum’s time in nature, while giving him a new understanding of the world he lives in, has not come with a toll. His mind is decaying, a song most thoroughly explored on “the Gleam, Pt. 3”. Fans of Elverum’s previous work under The Microphones will recognize this as a sequel of sorts to “the Gleam, Pt. 2”. Elverum has gone on record explaining “Pt. 2” as a song detailing his grandmother’s experience with dementia. “Pt. 3” is an exploration of that within his own mind: “Mind like a moth-eaten blanket / Wind whistling through the holes”, “I have seen the billowy black”, “I’ll climb through this torn wool mind hole in my knowing / to grandmother’s house”. Nature is whittling away at Elverum’s mind, replacing what he once knew with knowledge of the skies, the sound of whale calls echoing over still water, the overbearing weight of darkness resting on his neck. Elverum is decaying, slowly losing touch with the wreckage of the world he’s found himself in.
The album culminates in the twelve minute spoken word track “Demolition”. Elverum details his experience on a meditation retreat near his home outside of Anacortes, Washington. Here, Elverum is utterly destroyed. The iron of his mind cracks, layers upon layers of his mind slough off into nothingness. He is unformed. He is nothing. “Soft rain begins.”
Night Palace ends with “I Need New Eyes”. Despite Elverum’s destruction, he is still obsessed with “Why?” In his decay, it’s all he can ask himself. The final image of the album is a powerful one: “Now I’m staring at a boulder trying to tell myself / ‘This didn’t arise’ / I need new eyes”. Elverum cannot comprehend that there is no why. “All this impermanence is just another thingmy mind made”. The world is not something put here for Elverum, it is not for anyone. Yet we have treated it as such, and now it has decayed. We need new eyes.
Night Palace holds an incredibly special place in my heart. On release, I donned a denim jacket and took to the streets. I walked through the empty streets around my house, shuffling through empty neighborhoods. A cloud of mist settled above a construction site, and I wandered in to take pictures. I watched as steam billowed from the Conagra Foods plant on 15th Street. I walked past people in Halloween costumes, probably much less contemplative than I. To the two women I passed in front of the art building on MLK while I was ugly crying to “Demolition”, I apologize. I also apologize to the people sitting around me at the Mount Eerie show at Thalia Hall in Chicago for ugly crying to “Demolition” there as well.
Night Palace is worth every ounce of your time, and a perfect entry to one of the most impressive discographies of all time.
10/10.