Review Summary: signed, PHIL
Night Palace is the predictable crunch of twigs underfoot, that crisp non-smell of fall’s first snow, of being covered in moss and leaves with a cup of tea and a biscuit. It is sparse and familiar and peculiarly warming in a way that only cold places can be. Remember that time that you were walking and there were clouds and birds and green things and it was pleasant and at peace and good in a quiet, reassuring, unremarkable kind of way? That is this. Pines sway in wind, fog drips down mountainside, it is 2024, and Phil Elverum has released an album of music (just).
And that’s the thing: I wasn't sure Phil would ever
just make music again. His post-
Sauna records have each felt like byproducts of a bludgeoned soul, as opposed to albums of songs intended for other people to hear; as inward facing medicative relief through introspection and retrospection, supplanting all of Elverum's typically calming artistic calling cards: raindrops and recording tape, morning dew and mystery. That’s not to chastise his 2017 through 2020 chapters - their bleak literalism and starkness were justified by the events of 2016, and had their own terrifying allure, culminating in the transcendent live rendition of the
Crow and
Now Only songs,
(after). None of it felt like something I was supposed to enjoy, though. With each LP so personal and melodically bereft, to the point of (sometimes) discomfort, it was a weird time to fan for Phil. Mount Eerie became a solemn place - the aesthetic and themes and vibrance that previously made it
it simply ceased to be.
With
Night Palace, however, the day breaks. You get the sense, for the first time in years, that Phil actually enjoyed recording these songs. The whole thing feels explorative, giddily so, the creative process itself visible through the music. You get blurry fractal glimpses of Phil scrambling around, sketching out each new idea, quickly!, before it floats away, guitar here, poem there, add fuzz, repeat, repeat, again, again!, breathless and bumbling and boisterous like a honeybee with a drumkit and a lot of things to get off his chest. It’s sprawling and fidgety, a mercurial scrapbook, but cosy, snug, cloaked in nature and metaphor and fable, punctuated with static crackle and fret buzz and campfire melodies. Mount Eerie no longer channels the spirit of mourning, that deafening glow softened; the peak, instead, casts a shadow of relief and respite.
This new (apparent) outlook has consequences! The unifying thread of Mount Eerie’s 2024 entry - in stark contrast to the aforementioned instalments - is one of playfulness. Phil has a conversation with a fish. I didn’t expect him to do that. He then does his best
Nattens Madrigal impression (with nonchalance). He then scolds second home owners. He then removes his eyes. It’s dizzying and disjointed to the point of surreality, seriously unserious (though never silly), and (in many ways) a return to roots. Spindly acoustic songs of memorial and tribute are exchanged for lush swampy thumpers waxing lyrical on less concrete things: world-big-forever; people-small-finite.
It just finds this fantastic middle ground, not only in the way that its frantic smattering of ideas somehow presents not as overwhelming, but comforting - the exuberance infectious, the fuzz electric - but, also, in how
Night Palace ties in with the broader Elverum catalogue. It’s familiar and referential, yet avoids derivation and stagnation. You get whiffs of all the aesthetics of Phil - from
The Glow Pt.2 to
No Flashlight, from
Clear Moon to
Don’t Wake Me Up - yet it never feels like it repeats the narrative. It is a continuation, the next chapter, a new day.
I forget what I was trying to say.
Night Palace is a chaotic (good) album, one that doesn’t comply with pigeons or holes, and just won’t fit into a neat coherent narrative, as much as I have attempted to horn that shoe. I guess I’m just happy. My imaginary friend seems to be doing well, odds be damned. I am enjoying the new things he has to say. That’s enough.
