Hi, everyone. Nightthony Skytano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. I hope you are doing well. It is time for a review of the new Mount Eerie album, Night Palace.

Yep, here we have a brand new record from the ever-expanding discography of Mount Eerie, a music project spearheaded by singer, songwriter, home recorder, indie folk legend, Mr. Phil Elverum, aka The Microphones. Phil's work is something that I have been consistently covering on my channel for years and years and years now. In the decade+ that I've been doing this, he may be one of the most talked about artists on this channel.

If you've been following my reviews of his work, you know that recently he went through a very intense chapter of his career, told through a handful of albums on which Phil got very deeply personal and even autobiographical, as he wrestled with losing his partner and the mother of his child to cancer on the album, A Crow Looked at Me, to releasing that Microphones in 2020 album where Phil revived his old musical moniker in order to essentially give us the oral history of the first chapter of his music career. Also, remember, that record was basically one single 44-minute song, which, of course, had multiple musical and narrative phases to it, but for the for the most part, was a very consistent, very uniform listen, and intentionally so.

While that album is definitely not a personal favorite of mine to return to, it's still a one-of-a-kind record that is further proof of Phil's creativity and artistic fortitude. I think the same goes for this new album over here, but it's for very different reasons.

First, I believe this is the longest Mount Eerie album to date at 26 tracks and 80 minutes of run time. A great deal of the tracklist on this one is obviously not playing out across one or two super long tracks – rather a bunch of one to two-minute vignette type songs, some of which flow into each other pretty effectively in terms of themes and aesthetics. Others diverge completely, and it all leads to a pretty disjointed flow that, to my ears, is reminiscent of a lot of early Microphones, records like The Glow Part Two, as well as It Was Hot, We Stayed In Water. That choppiness is only enhanced by numerous tracks on this thing, hitting you with abrupt endings whose sudden silence is made deafening by very loud climaxes at the finish, or these mic drop closing lines that really hit you with a profound or emotional gut punch.

Now, on the surface, though, I understand if this record or a lot of Phil's classic works come across as being maybe a bit too loose or like he's just sketching musically and poetically. I mean, after all, still to this day, Phil's recording quality tends to run very demo, very low-fi to the ears of the uninitiated. It might seem like he's fooling around. But I think deeper listens reveal just how much thematic and sonic consistency there is to Night Palace and how snugly the record fits into the greater Mount Eerie/Microphones ecosystem.

Because throughout this LP, there are a lot of lyrical themes that will be very familiar to those who have been listening to Phil's work for years, like the impermanence of existence, the vastness of the world, the infinity of time and space and nature, as well as mankind's limited abilities to encapsulate that and understand it and perceive it. I think a lot of these ideas are taking new shape on this record because Phil is just in such a different place in his life. He delivers some revelations on topics toward the end of the album that I'll get into later. But again, the difference in approach he is taking to these ideas is obviously being influenced by his growth as an artist, his newfound responsibilities as a father, the way his aging body and mind is causing him to look at his own mortality in different ways.

Also, not to mention one of his biggest muses – nature – is being hauled out and destroyed before his very eyes by pollution and abuse of the planet and climate change, forest fires.

And simultaneously, while all of that sounds very serious and dark and grave, as somebody who's been following Phil's work for a long time, let me say I think this might actually be one of his most joyous records in quite a while. I mean, even on some of those existential moments that I was alluding to earlier, like with the track "Broom of Wind", there's still a warmth to a singing and a blissful vibe coming off of the clean guitars and laid back drum beats on track, which are quite the contrast from the lyrical framing of his life being like something that's being slowly worn down to a nub with every use or a broom that's made of straw and falling apart over the course of years.

Additionally, in the final moments of the track "I Walk", Phil says, "Until I, too, dissipate / find me blinking at dawn." While this track is also very much a meditation on existentialism, there's also an interconnectedness with which he observes things rising up and falling off and disappearing over time. It's almost a little reassuring.

I also think for Phil, there's a catharsis to a lot of the performances on these tracks and a vibrance between the variety of influences that we're being hit with here as you have cuts on this thing that not only indulge in spoken word and ambient music and drone and noise, a bit of lo-fi metal here and there, some touches of beats and electronics. But many songs in the tracklist on this thing are actually pretty straightforward, blunt indie rock barn burners with driving drums and riffs.

So clearly, to me, there's an electricity going on here with Phil's creative process that hasn't really been there on his past couple of records which have been much more uniform and consistent.

Then to further bolster my point that this record is quite the positive one from Phil, there are a lot of tracks that when you dig into them are steeped in very deep feelings of love, whether it be "My Canopy", which is obviously a very potent expression of fatherly love, or the track "Swallowed Alive", which is obviously a noisy experimental fun moment that Phil is having with his daughter, where she's screaming under these very lofi and noisy drums and guitar riffs and talking toward the very end of the track about getting like, swallowed up by a lion. It's obviously a very endearing and entertaining cameo.

And even deeper into the record, there are other tracks where I feel like Phil is showing his personality and sense of humor or knack for folksy storytelling, like with the beautiful but puzzling recollections of maybe having heard whales singing far out into the ocean, complete with this minute or so long noise wall in which you could pick up some musical ideas that are just faintly there.

There's also "I Saw Another Bird", which in a way he's trying to paint the obliviousness of mankind, where the protagonist is standing there oblivious to the world around him while this bird is attempting to get his attention. Also connected to these themes is the track "I Spoke with a Fish", where the protagonist of this track is essentially trying to put a fish on some game. Tell the fish his perception of the world is small or irrelevant or skewed by the fact that he lives in the water. Then immediately afterwards, the fish actually enlightens the human and tells him, Actually, your perception of the supposedly solid world and Earth surrounding you is false. They end up reaching a friendly resolution. The fish's final line on the track is represented by a sample of Jeff Bridges from the movie The Big Lebowski, which just further contributes to how sincere and beautiful and moving and amazing this Mount Eerie album can be at points, but also fucking absurd.

What's also surprising is just how boldly Phil heads into just giving us some straight up political commentary on these tracks, whether that be on the "Non-Metaphorical Decolonization" cut where he essentially calls for the death of the mythology of America. There's also "November Rain", which is very much a song about wealth disparity, as Phil depicts all of these wealthy people's summer homes sitting there empty in the middle of the night, fully lit up for no fucking reason whatsoever other than to just stand there as a show of opulence, obnoxiously so. Phil also goes into what he views as the absurdity of owning land and owning things like trees on "Co-owner of Trees".

So, yeah, all I'm saying is that Phil clearly has a a lot of energy and a lot of oomph on this record to be standing so boldly and staunchly on all these opinions. When you look at the entire record, broad scale, you actually realize ingeniously a lot of these songs are bunched up together at various points of the LP. It's like he worked the album together in little chapters and subsections. I will be frank and say that I feel like I'm still learning all the ways in which each of these chunks of the record are sewn and pieced together. But the connections are very clearly there, not just between the tracks that are shoulder to shoulder, but there's also a lot of back referencing, too, be it to moments that happened earlier on the album or even moments that happened earlier in Phil's career.

I would actually say the final leg of this record is where he tends to get the most meta, whether he's reflecting on his own creative process or the current paradigm in which he exists where he feels like historical and social context is collapsing in on itself, which he expresses through observing a niece of his wearing a Nirvana T-shirt or going over his writing process and how fleeting that can feel on the song writing poems, which, broadly enough, is another one of the more straightforward, cathartic indie rockers on the record.

What's also clearly on Phil's mind during this section of the record is whether or not his own art really means anything in the grander scheme of things, too, or whether or not it's even effective at trying to convey and depict the things and experiences that it's connected to. I mean, there's literally a line on this record where he says, music is pretty much just a statue of a waterfall. A point made pretty effectively, not only because the statue in this scenario is a depiction of something else, but typically, the beauty and appeal of a waterfall is its movement, which obviously you're not getting out of the statue. I mean, even look at the closing line of the first track on this record where it's clear that a lot of the thoughts that Phil is pulling together on this record are a part of this writing series, poetry series that's existing in a notebook of some page somewhere. As he's writing it, he himself questions as to whether or not anybody's even going to see this or read this or hear this.

The self-reflections continue on to the track "The Gleam Part 3", which any longtime Elverum fan is going to recognize as a sequel to a song that he recorded decades ago. He further extends the existential themes of that track by going into his own experiences around aging and his changing life. These reflections get even darker, in my opinion, on "Stone Woman Gives Birth to a Child at Night".

But all of the doom and gloom of the record comes to a bit of a head on the longest track on the record, the 12-minute "Demolition", which is a lengthy multifaceted spoken word track, something that, broadly enough, Phil hasn't really done that much in his career.

As closely as his vocals tend to be to spoken word, because his singing tends to be so subdued and gentle, almost like he's conversing and singing to you at the same time. But yeah, again, this whole spoken word thing, this is not something Phil tends to head into this boldly, and definitely not for 12 frigging minutes. But I will say it's a pretty climactic and essential moment on the record, which is backed up very nicely by all of these field recordings of wind and disjointed guitars. A lot of the major themes throughout the album actually crop up in this very lengthy meditation that revolves around an experience that Phil describes involving a meditation retreat. And while there are some pockets of the track, especially toward the very end, that I think tend to get a bit too new agey, I do like and respect the fact that Phil's writing on this song is not only delivered in a very emotionally compelling way, but that it effectively ties up pretty much everything he's touching down on throughout the entire album, whether it's the personal connections that he has to his past, his family, the nature that surrounds him, or his art.

Then after this, the closing track on the record is really like a conceptual flip for Phil. It's really a spot where he's going over his older works and things that he said and done in the past that he's like, No, actually, I was wrong, or I disagree, or there's something I'm perceiving now that I didn't realize before due to a lack of experience. There have been similarly meta moments in his catalog, like at the start of "A Crow Looked at Me", where he goes over how he used to write about death on his older records.

Specifically on this closing track here on Night Palace, he goes over the concept of impermanence and the ways in which he's been writing about that over the years. He, again, really has changed his mind on this issue here. He states this very boldly and very plainly that he now sees the world and existence less as a series of starts and finishes and more as just this endless continuation of things that stuff doesn't so much arise as much as it's just, again, a continuation of something that's already been happening. Maybe you didn't notice it before. It only seems like it's arising because you weren't aware of it prior to maybe a certain peak of growth, irrelevance, and so on and so forth.

Which, again, maybe to some might seem like obvious idea or observation or point. But we are talking about a guy who for years and years and years, to the point of serious infatuation, has been writing about and inspired by this idea to one degree or another. Now, after so much time spent writing about this and so many years of albums under his belt, he's now coming to realize, oh, actually, it's all like a continuum, which for sure is a pretty interesting development.

I will say I do I have some minor criticisms of the record and its flow because for sure, there are some tracks that while I understand the brevity of some of these cuts and some of the more interlude type moments of the tracklist, that is an appeal of the project for sure. However, there are some moments that I feel like breeze by, don't really leave a super strong impression or impact. While I do deeply appreciate and love this record for its versatility and some of its experiments, some pan out better than others, like that whole passage of Phil throwing electronics into the mix and putting some autotune on his voice in order to embody the fish that he's talking to on "I Spoke with the Fish". It's genius, hilarious, amazing.

However, the weird, choppy, inconsistent electronics and hi-hats on "Stone Woman" I didn't really get a whole lot out of. The musical transition in the middle of "Myths Come True", I think, left something to be desired, as well as the aesthetic connections between "Wind & Fog", one and two.

Still, with that being said, great record from Phil, great record from Mount Eerie. It is a personal, passionate, philosophical, intriguing, and cathartic little album, and by little, I mean actually quite massive. As we are still talking about 26 tracks in 80 minutes here. However, that is in 80 minutes that for me personally, I got more and more and more out of the more I listened to it, the more I dug the lyrics. There are actually quite a few very instantly appealing and hooky and riffy tracks on this record that lead me to believe this is actually one of the more digestible projects Phil has put out in a while as well.

So yeah, it could even be a nice introduction for those who are getting into his music, especially since I do think there are a lot of creative and aesthetic parallels between this and older classic Microphones works that have proven to be quite influential and significant over the years that they've been out.

But yeah, there you go. That is me really trying to break down this very difficult to break down record that is so all over the place, is so layered, is so multifaceted, and really is so, so, so, so, so so unforgivably dense at points. And I'm feeling a decent 8 on this one.

Anthony Fantano. Mount Eerie. Forever.