Mount Eerie returns with Night Palace's nostalgic patchwork

Anacortes, Washington, which may be the essence of Mount Eerie in city form, should be addressed to either side of my ears, as if natural splendour is a portable device to Elverum. When he sings, it’s a closely felt lullaby. When he strums his guitars, he creatively pings them between ears, as if the listener is surrounded by a naturally occurring indie folk band. Listening to a Mount Eerie or Microphones song is indistinguishable from living inside of one, in its own physical space.

Elverum, under the Microphones name, brought a wonder and creative majesty to DIY home recording that few even attempt to imitate; how hard is it to treat an album like a quilt with countless years and hours spent to make even the most minor of stitches sound like an ocean of sound rushing into you in a moment? Hard. It’s why The Glow Pt. 2 used to be a singular album, at least before Night Palace signalled his return to sprawling glory. Whereas his Mount Eerie output grappled with mortality in segments and with maturity, Night Palace is Elverum remaking The Glow Pt. 2 to update his outlook on the all-too-human process of living and dying, and with a millstone of experience in tow.

Elverum has written that he sees the comparison people have made to The Glow Pt. 2, a touchpoint he sees himself. Functionally, Night Palace flows in nearly the same way, with 50-second interludes, devastating ballads, lo-fi trickery, and rumbling distortion draining their way to an Earth-shattering and subtle closer. The DIY creativity takes the form of acoustic electronics and the occasional trap beat with autotune vocals (re-read that and process if need be), updating his psychedelic production style for the 20 years in advancements made since.

There are pockets of the record where Elverum is even reaching the exact midpoint between his sound and Swans, where his typically distorted, lo-fi takes on rock get jettisoned into post-rock-esque propulsion. Conversely, there are just enough indietronica moments that you can conjure the visual of Elverum dusting off his synthesizers in an abandoned church. It’s a record of instrumental multitude filtered into backgrounds and soundscapes for the last near-decade of his poetry to rest atop.

Like his previous Mount Eerie output, Night Palace is dense with talk-singing and running past his rhythmic meter like it was a stop sign he didn’t quite see. Rhymes don’t quite fit into succinct bars or always exist, like life, it’s messy. He speaks with fish, ruminates about crows, and landmarks his time as a father; we’re all beholden to the same ecosystem in his perception. Since A Crow Looked at Me, he’s often remarked that his past lyrics on mortality have rung immature, a fascination that life has since framed with experience. What was once consisting of poetic epics (his Mount Eerie album under the Microphones name was a near-rock opera about the afterlife), is now a topic defined by ambiguity, commonality, and the natural everyday. We all die and have something to say; life goes on.

With every track a souvenir of good ideas taken up throughout an illustrious career, and every lyric a hard-earned proverb, Night Palace could easily be defined as Elverum’s wisest release. It contains the breadth of a career and of a life spent in dedication to compatible wavelengths, of sounds in the new.

I remember sitting in front of my record player years ago, bereaved and searching for easy answers, when I opened up a recently received package from Anacortes, WA. It was a vinyl pressing of A Crow Looked at Me that I impulse bought to try to bring out a feeling, a something, an anything. It contained hand-written sentiments and photographs, labels thanking the buyer from Elverum, and a record with one revelation after the next. With Night Palace in front of me, I recognize the same radical human tendency I’ve grown into: we live on in-spite-of, and because-of. For all its natural mystery, life must always go on.