Night Palace by Mount Eeerie
“And so what if no one ever finds this notebook,” Phil Elverum sings in a dying fall, just before the title track of Night Palace similarly fades and expires. Because that track opens a 26-song, 81-minute double album of several varieties of indie music, Elverum implies that the entire creative effort would satisfy him even if no one else heard it.
It might be true: Elverum’s last album under the Mount Eerie moniker came out in 2019, and he laid this one to tape unhurriedly, mostly from December 2022 to May 2024, handling all songwriting, playing, producing, and (with two or three minutes of exceptions) singing.
Despite the unpressured pace of creation and capture, much of Night Palace shivers with tension. “Swallowed Alive” is a 53-second unleashing of drums and guitar squalls and screams; “I Heard Whales (I Think)” shifts from a slowly swelling ballad to a kind of oceanic, stormy static, then back to a ballad; and the two parts of “Wind & Fog” contrast fuzzbox rock with electronic humming that belies a calm state.
When focusing less on experimentation, Elverum constructs modern rock that, when downbeat like “Huge Fire,” brings him close to Bright Eyes or Death Cab for Cutie, and, when upbeat or uptempo like “Writing Poems,” gives him the air of a softer-spoken cousin to Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard.
Pollard and Elverum share a tendency to cut great songs short, but Elverum stretches with “Demolition,” a 12-minute narration unspooled thoughtfully in an environment of wintry wind, elusively strummed acoustic guitar, and sudden jolts of organic, tribalistic timekeeping.
In its slow carefulness and even-tempered verbosity, “Demolition” is a longer letter among 25 shorter notes and postcards. The way Elverum stacks these missives to form Night Palace represents an inwardly complicated artist living an outwardly simple life.
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