Night Palace is the 11th Studio Album from Phil Elverum’s wildly versatile solo project, Mount Eerie. Released on November 1st through Elverum’s label, this project is filled with creativity, passion, grief, and paranoia.
It should be noted that throughout his career, Phil collaborated with his late wife, Geneviève Castrée, as a creative partner. They would continue to work and perform together until her untimely passing from Pancreatic cancer in 2016.
Elverum was born and raised in Anacortes, Washington. Always being guided towards music throughout his adolescence, in 1997, Elverum made a significant life change. He moved to Olympia, where his ambitious teenage eyes were opened to Punk and Alternative music. Soon after, Elverum would form The Microphones and begin to release studio-length records. In the musician’s early career stages, one can hear the makings of their songwriting style. Softly sung, sad, melancholy lyrics lay over stripped-down DIY production techniques. Whether the song’s instrumentals are quiet or raging, this writing template still holds true.
Eerie resulted from a metamorphosis of Elverum, who believed they had completed what they had set out to do with The Microphones. It was time for a new name, even if the direction of the music hadn’t immediately taken a drastic change. Eerie’s latest release, Night Palace, shares many themes with Elverum’s early work, yet it has an encroaching tone of absence and loss weaved throughout.
Night Palace opens with a self-titled first track, unleashing overdriven synths that devour the soundscape. Throughout the album, while the instrumentals may be intense and unrelenting, the vocals always come across as gentle and clear, somehow cutting through to the top of the mix and delicately resting upon it.
The sounds achieved through various “Night Palace” methods effectively create a sensory experience teetering off the cliff’s edge towards oblivion of overload. This tends to put the listener in a trance-like state, which is not entirely unlike hypnosis. This “auditory hypnosis” only draws the audience closer to the lyrics being sung by Elverum. Lyrics that lightly cover the loss that Elverum still struggles with.
Tracks further down the album offer something other than the aggressive noisiness heard in the opening. For example, track 14, “I Saw Another Bird,” relies mostly on a distorted but gentle guitar riff to carry the song as Elverum ponders his encounters with nature and what hides in the minds of the animals we see every day. The influence of Elverum’s Washington upbringing can also be heard in these calmer tracks, both in various references to nature and its general grungy sound.
Night Palace is a bold and gigantic project that spans multiple genres and emotional states. Under a critical microscope, some songs might scare away potential fans upon the first listen. However, there is as much calm and serenity to be found as chaos in the vast 1hr 20m runtime. With gut-wrenching introspection and wittiness, it would be hard to listen to many of these songs without coming away reflecting upon one’s feelings and experiences. Above all else, this is a powerful work of art.
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