Mount Eerie’s 2017 album A Crow Looked at Me and its follow-up, 2018’s Now Only, were largely acoustic efforts filled with intensely pained songs written in the aftermath of the death of songwriter and producer Phil Elverum’s wife, Genevieve Castrée. Songs like the aching “Real Death” frankly questioned the purpose of making art at all.
Mount Eerie’s new album, Night Palace, is far more guarded, filled with Motorik beats and buzzing guitars that threaten to swallow up Elverum’s fragile vocals. The DIY feel of the album’s packaging and presentation extends to the lo-fi recordings themselves as well as the lyrics, which read like diary entries turned into poetry: “I walk until it’s all fallen away/Coming into the clearing/There’s a pause between the breaths/I look up,” Elverum sings on “I Walk.”
Elverum lives in the island town of Anacortes, Washington, and like black metal musicians paying tribute to Scandinavian fjords and forests, Mount Eerie’s glitchy noise mirrors the Pacific Northwest’s weather, with sounds and samples evoking storm clouds amassing on the horizon. Elverum’s song titles often make allusions to nature and animals, and Night Palace is no exception: “November Rain,” “Co-Owner of Trees,” “I Heard Whales (I Think),” among others.
Elverum pushes sonic elements to their breaking point: The folky “(soft air)” quickly transforms into a blast of feedback, while the droning keyboards on “Wind & Fog pt. 2” overpower the brief stretches of vocals and guitar. “Breaths” goes one further, with mumbled vocals, arrhythmic drums, and guitar plucking buried under a sea of static. And while “Broom of Wind” is fairly tuneful, it consists of just one verse followed by guitar and clarinet solos before ending suddenly.
With such a varied work—there are even allusions to popular music, like a short sequence of trap hi-hats and Auto-Tune on “I Spoke with a Fish”—some kind of structure becomes vital. But the album’s song sequencing feels arbitrary, and the sound mix obscures much of what Elverum is trying to convey. And yet, because Night Palace defies easy categorization, it ultimately offers a welcome challenge, as mysterious and fickle as nature itself.
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The post Mount Eerie ‘Night Palace’ Review: Bucolic Indie Rock That’s as Fickle as Nature Itself appeared first on Slant Magazine.