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 title as a brand new alias; the second got here after the loss of life of his accomplice, Geneviève, in 2016, on a sequence of austere albums that reckoned along 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 fruits 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 educating himself learn how to deliver 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 aid to listen to an album the place he actually recites poetry twice—and in addition talks to a fish, which responds in a well-recognized stoner drawl. Night time Palace embraces among the largest 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, at all times questioning his personal artwork and assumptions, awed by the pure world however cautious of assigning metaphorical significance to it. At 46, he’s nonetheless making an attempt to clarify 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 means. The primary disc accommodates among 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 title, 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 Fowl” and seasick-sounding early spotlight “Large Fireplace” proceed from the identical scrappy live-band sound he explored on 2015’s Sauna, the final album he put out earlier than Geneviève’s loss of life.