In Phil Elverum’s earlier years writing songs as The Microphones and then Mount Eerie, it seemed like time and space were the only powers that he regarded. He lived, and still lives, in rural Washington among the islands of Puget Sound, far enough removed from the world (particularly the other Washington) to feel like nature and the cycle of life were the only things that had any meaning or relevance to his life and work.
Then he had a blunt-force encounter with the truth of life and death when his long-term partner and the mother of his child, Geneviève Castrée, passed away of cancer. Suddenly it wasn’t metaphorical. Death was real. In reaction, he stripped his music back to its sparsest and erased imagery. With viciously vivid diary-like entries about her passing and the absence that followed, he filled a pair of powerfully poignant albums in A Crow Looked At Me and Now Only.
His releases since then – Lost Wisdom pt. 2 and Microphones in 2020 – have shown a gradual return to the more elemental and voluminous music he had been making prior to Castrée’s passing. With Night Palace, his first album in four years and an 81 minute opus that traverses styles and themes, we can safely say that nature is healing.
Not that Night Palace is completely disconnected from those years of devastation – it shares a title with the poem that graced the cover of A Crow Looked At Me, and in the essay accompanying the record Elverum describes the ‘Night Palace’ as the veil between the worlds inhabited by himself and his deceased. We also get to hear more about their daughter (who also contributes vocally in “Swallowed Alive”) – but we also hear subtly about a new partner who has become embedded in his life.
This rediscovered domestic happiness imbues Night Palace with a newfound ease, which has yielded his most diverse and longest record to date. While much of it is in Elverum’s favoured strolling alt-rock gait with layers of distortion, the canvas is wide enough to encompass stripped-back acoustic songs and full-bore black metal passages. To some extent it feels like a herding up of all the pieces he’s recorded in the last few years; a cynic could complain about quality control, but for Elverum and his devoted fanbase everything here is essential – even the song called “Empty Paper Towel Roll” turns out to be a magnificent paean to existence and the unknowable vastness of the cosmos.
The first section of Night Palace is something like Elverum taking stock of where he is now. “I talk back to birds way more than I used to” he admits on opener “Night Palace”, while on groovy second track “Huge Fire” he sings: “All this shattered wood I’ve been pulling into a heap of flames and smoke / this is my life.” The brief but beautiful “My Canopy”, meanwhile, is a simple song of devotion to his child.
His quotidian life becomes clear in songs like “Broom Of Wind”, a slide-guitar imbued jaunt about (you guessed it) sweeping, that turns into a meditation on mortality. “I Walk” is similarly straightforward-but-not, finding Elverum fully in his bag as his instrumentation perfectly describes his walk into the wilderness and his gradual dissipation into the natural beauty around him.
The middle section of Night Palace turns more self-examining and drives deeper into ageing. The two-part “Wind & Fog” finds him admitting that his past, with all its baggage, will never leave him, but also has him showing thankfulness for the new person in his life. The following “Blurred World” places him among the unceasing spinning of the planets, unable to avoid the fact he’s getting older and his eyesight is worsening, but as he pisses into the night he’s able to appreciate “I’m just happily here in the dusk / myself just as blurry”.
He then spends another trio of tracks communing with nature. In “I Heard Whales (I Think)”, Elverum hears music coming out of the mysterious sounds of the ocean, and the wonder that it creates in him – especially as someone who’s spent most of his life in the most rural locations – is heartening. “I Saw Another Bird” is squabble between his plain reality and the wondrous imagination that he lets run free in his music – “I’m wrong! / There is another world inside this one”, he resolves. Lastly in this trilogy, “I Spoke With A Fish” recounts a back and forth with a fish about perception, where Elverum is schooled by the scaled one but they ultimately come out pals.
As we shift into the back half of Night Palace, Elverum’s uneasy relationship with his neighbours and the history of his home become the focus. The Yo La Tengo-esque jam “Non-metaphorical Decolonization” is exactly what its title suggests; his raging against the blood-soaked foundation of America (“the old idea, I want it to die”) over rollicking, crashing, cathartic rock. The deceptively sprightly “November Rain” finds him venting about the holiday home owners on the island where he lives, who leave their lights on throughout the winter, despite not being there. He reflects on the idea that doing so is some kind of claim over their land, but, as pounding percussion overtakes the jaunty guitar strums, he comes back to the thought “don’t they realize all our stolen wealth is built on screaming bones?”. The following “Co-Owner of Trees” is a guitar workout that has a slightly more lighthearted take on the idea of land rights, but still finds him admitting “I’m a passing through indebted fool”.
Reaching the tail end of the record, Elverum’s struggle between the real world and the one of dreams and fantasies is explored. The clattering muscular rocker “& Sun” finds him wavering in his connection to reality – “I have my footing then I fly off again” – before the mystical synth trudge “the Gleam pt. 3” further interrogates the border between waking and dreaming life; in the day he’s saying hello to parents at school, while at night he’s swimming across a black ocean. The languid meditation of “Stone Woman Gives Birth To A Child At Night” finds him literally traversing a border between existences, returning from camping deep in the wilderness to the “cacophony” of real life, with all its leaden issues. Confronted by the onslaught of information that reconnecting to society brings, Elverum is left to ponder a confusing passage he read, and conclude that he is empty.
This all tees up for the 12-minute “Demolition”, the penultimate track on the record, which is something of a return to the diaristic style of his post-Castrée albums, mostly speaking rather than singing. Over howling wind, flutes and further wheezing atmosphere, he touches on all of the themes that have come before: his mortality and hopes, the turbulence of his past, the daily activities that keep him ticking over, interactions with people, the conflict he feels about living on land that was stolen from indigenous people – but, most of all, the blissful insignificance of himself as a single being amidst a vast expanse of nature. Despite the palpable anguish and despair in the telling, the overall story is of his having reconstructed himself and learnt to find contentedness in all of the seething mass of conflicts and issues in the modern world.
With the droning closing track “I Need New Eyes” he returns to his ur-theme for all of his work: impermanence. “The constant catastrophes pound on the door / and who isn’t my neighbor on this flaming globe?” he asks. It’s an acceptance that, despite vast differences, we are one, we are in this struggle together and that it is one that has been raging for generations and will continue for generations to come. It’s as strong a message as any that Phil Elverum is – yes, terrified, angry, desolate – but renewed. It is hopeful.
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