In Love With the Last of the Light: "Night Palace" by Mount Eerie Review

Graphic by Sofia Giarrusso

By Christian Jones

I was a junior in high school when I discovered Phil Elverum. It was 2020—sometime around the cold, quiet November of quarantine. I started with one of Elverum’s early projects, The Microphones’ 2001 album, The Glow, Pt. 2. It was perfect timing; that same November my mom had to be admitted to the hospital for kidney failure and a severe case of endometriosis. Amidst the broader tumult of quarantine—widespread illness and death, isolation, the utter collapse of time—the most meaningful relationship in my life was put on the line. I lacked the vocabulary to articulate this fear of mortality. So, I would sit on my roof and watch the sunset, bundled up in the snow, while Phil Elverum sang my feelings. The album weaves between soft, folky tracks to grandiose bursts of sound and emotion, so as to encompass the full range of sadness. At times his voice was so fragile and raw I thought I would burst, and other times it felt so full of anguish that it was like I was standing in my grief. The Glow, Pt. 2 allowed me to feel my torrent of teenage emotions, unabashedly and unrestrained by pretense, in a world where we often recoil from our own vulnerability.

As my Mom recovered, I began seeing birds; I discovered Mount Eerie, Phil Elverum’s other major project. While sitting at a table in the hospital lobby the day before my Mom’s big surgery, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. A small brown bird was hopping on the table next to me. It had somehow flown into the building, either through the garage, or an open window—maybe it got trapped in the elevator, or loose from a patient’s cage. We stared at each other, in curious disbelief, then it flew away. My mom’s surgery went well, and in months she made a full recovery. In the weeks following, I listened to Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me. It was released one year after the death of Elverum’s wife, Geneviève, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer shortly after the birth of their child. The album marked a departure from Elverum’s earlier projects because it abandoned the abstraction and metaphor of The Glow Pt. 2 for plain-spoken mundane details. It was Elverum’s search for meaning in the wake of death. Birds hold a significant meaning on the album, as signs of visitation from another world, spiritual emblems. To Elverum, the crow was Geneviève; to me, the bird was an omen, a symbol of protection.

Night Palace marks another major evolution in Elverum’s artistic and philosophical outlook, one tempered by age and reflection. It sees Elverum finding the spiritual in the everyday, not just in spectacular moments. The title of the album comes from a poem by Joanne Kyger of the same name (and is also on the album cover of A Crow Looked at Me). The poem’s themes ripple throughout the album: life as a waking dream, the past never really disappearing, death as rebirth, the confluence of all time. On the opening track, “Night Palace,” Elverum suggests that he is embodying a new perspective, saying, “I talk back to birds way more than I used to/ A spirit world found/ Out past where belief blows away.” He has abandoned his need to know the mysterious inner-workings of the universe, and is simply trading perspective with birds and fish throughout the album as a way to get out of his own human insularity. On “I Saw Another Bird,” Elverum references his previous obsession with birds with a newfound nonchalance, “So what, I saw another raven?/ I actually see them all the time/ And I hear their voices talking/ About what the rest of us don’t know.” On “I Spoke With A Fish,” over a chorus of his own voice and a skittering electronic beat, Elverum has a This is Water-esque conversation with a fish about the nature of reality. It teaches him that nothing is solid, that everything is interconnected “flowing matter.” This spurs a beautiful meditation on the metaphysical limits of music: “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall/ The flashing glint on the marble where the eye once was/ On a taxidermied marlin’s frozen leap.” The exhilarating rock-heavy track “Writing Poems,” is a self-referential catalogue of metaphors about how the album can never really get it all, “And if masterpiece arises/ Made of all this that the sky includes/ A poem only barely says the thing halfway.” Whether it is the world itself or the music Elverum uses to evoke it, he honors the unknowable. Rather than be discouraged by the limits of perspective and creation, he finds solace in them. 

The music isn’t all inadequate expression though.There are an abundance of sonically impressionistic moments on the album that mirror the themes Elverum sings about. Despite knowing their limitations, Elverum never stops using song, poetry, and metaphor to get his points across. “Night Palace” opens with riveting distortion like the flashes of lightning Elverum describes, while “Huge Fire” ends with grainy buzzing like a wall of fire. The chaotic “Swallowed Alive,” is a storm of blows and (his daughter’s) screams, like you have been dropped into a Hieronymous Bosch painting. On “(soft air),” Elverum blows a sonic burst of distortion into our ears with a “Whoo.” The deafening track “Wind & Fog” recalls The Glow Pt. 2’s “Samurai Sword,” with its relentless monsoon of distorted drum crashes and guitar drone. On “I Heard Whales (I Think),” Elverum insists that he heard whalesong while walking on a beach and lets us decide for ourselves, including over a minute of raw audio from that very beach. Through the tape saturation, crashing ocean waves, and chirping birds, you can hear the faint echo of some melodic drone. We are no more sure of what it is than Elverum, and in playing the clip for us he draws us into his state of awe at the mystery of the world.

The album is laden with self-awareness, but it never restrains its intimacy because of it. “Empty Paper Towel Roll,” finds the perfect metaphor for subjectivity: “It’s as if I’m looking at a corner of the sky through a cardboard tube/ and I’m impressed, seems huge/ this is my idea of bottomlessness.” Elverum interrogates his own point of view atop crunchy guitars and drums, wondering if he can see outside of his small perspective. It turns out, he can only steal a peek at infinitude: “and finally the sun cracks over the hill/ a brief glimpse through wide-open air.” The short and catchy “Broom of Wind,” is another mundane metaphor for our cosmically small and repetitive lives, Elverum describing himself as, “Only the occurrence of a person.” The track “I Walk,” reverberates with all of Elverum’s past meditations on walking (“Through the Trees Pt. 2,” “I Walked Home Beholding,” and “Pumpkin”). It opens with the sound of rain on a roof and wind audibly blowing, as Elverum walks through towns, “sheddin’ slow the generations,” his footfall like a drum. Sonically and lyrically, it is about the paradox of moving forward but carrying the past with you at all times. In this version though, Elverum comes to a clearing and has a moment of spiritual ecstasy: “Mist kissed face/ vast grass shufflin’/ treeless place/ expanse encirclin’/ the sky on my lips/ fog pulled in slow.” Elverum hums and harmonizes with himself, while epic guitar riffs and drums encircle him, crooning “until I, too, dissipate.” Subjectivity may be inescapable, but it is also our route to connection. By communing with nature and the present moment, we can experience union, transcendence.

The latter portion of the album shows that Elverum’s metaphysical self-awareness extends into introspection on colonialism, ownership, and national identity. “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization,” sees Elverum reflecting on his relationship to the land he lives on. At times gritty with chugging guitars, and other times sparse with gentle acoustic plucking, Elverum rejects everything built on stolen land—he literally wishes “This America, the old idea, I want it to die.” “November Rain” is a critique of his neighbors, who leave their lights on during the part of the year they live elsewhere so as to signal ownership of their private property. On “Co-owner of Trees,” Elverum dreams of a co-ownership between the natural world and its inhabiting humans, cursing the owners who flout their dominion over nature: “I speak a spell against their private property signs, in our woods, I ask, ‘What’s mine?’” The rattling beat of “Stone Woman Gives Birth To A Child At Night” is as restless as Elverum, who is trying to sort out the moral paradox between spirituality and real-world oppression. He feels that his meditation retreat is a privileged space of peace away “From the world’s bombing and cries.”

Over the 26-song expanse that is Night Palace, Elverum is not only in dialogue with all of his past selves, but a range of artists and genres across time and space. In an interview with Matthew Schnipper, Elverum explains that his influences range from Stereolab to Ragana, from Zen Buddhist Sutras to Ursula K. Le Guin. All the inspirations that permeate the album are held together by a tone of exploration and uncertainty. As Elverum mentions in the interview, “I think a lot of people lately have a negative read on [uncertainty], but I think of it as not being too stuck on whatever your viewpoint or your perception is in that moment.” There aren’t always clear cut answers or divisions in the real world, and his music portrays this well. It is the perfect emotional companion for our morally ambiguous times. On “I Need New Eyes,” the final track, Elverum chooses positivity and peace in the name of “mystical ignorance.” He chooses to lay in the tall grass and watch his breath pass, for after all, “The constant catastrophes pound on the wall/ And who isn’t my neighbor on this flaming globe?”

On my first listen, I was sitting on the Orange line across from an old hispanic man. He had a grey mustache. He was wearing a navy shirt, and navy pants, a black Champion zip-up sweatshirt, a black “LA” hat, and white Nike shoes. He was sitting next to who I presumed to be his daughter. He looked tired. He watched me watching him, and I looked away feeling a bit awkward. He looked at me for a bit before I looked back and he averted his eyes. I ended up settling on his shoes and my eyes welled up at Phil Elverum’s voice. We looked at each other one more time before I got off the train. I didn’t know anything about him, but we shared a space together, and for however small and insignificant the moment might seem, we were aware of each other. The reason I mention this anecdote, and my mom’s illness, is because Elverum’s music serves as a reminder that we are alive. What truly matters in life is so often drowned out by the daily grind, by rote repetition—“this endless et cetera.” Elverum’s music reaffirms our presence in the world, among other human beings, in our own fragile bodies. He knows firsthand that we disappear in the blink of an eye which is why he reveres the moment. That is all there is. I am reminded of a James Baldwin quote: “I’m aware, you know, that I and the people I love may perish in the morning. I know that. But there’s light on our faces now.” As Elverum says on the title track, “I’m in love with the last of the light/ However long I have left in life.” The light takes so many forms. The way a fish swims. A mysterious sound on an empty beach. The beating heart of a tiny bird.