Night Palace

My unabashed meatriding of Phil Elverum’s craft under the name of Mount Eerie and The Microphones is no secret, so it is no strange thing that my loins have been soaked in anticipation for this colossal double-album from one of my favorite artists of all time. Being the first release since I became a rabid stan and considering the fact that the singles just about made me shit myself, my expectations quickly crossed the Kuiper Belt.

My darling didn’t disappoint.

In true Phil fashion, “Night Palace” is an unpredictably expansive, wildly unhinged, and entirely breathtaking masterpiece of a project that somersaults from idea to idea with wanton abandon. Though his past projects are famed for challenging the preconceptions of how songs and albums are to be made, this new project is easily Phil’s most daring and demanding one yet. Nothing is held back. Throughout its grandiose runtime just north of 80 minutes, Phil juggles everything from his usual flair of indie folk, to raw black metal fused with a recording of his daughter, to fast-paced affairs transforming to drone halfway through the track, to crushing tides of distortion threatening to collapse the entire song, to unpredictable bouts of noise, to… trap? From its infancy, it’s an album forged in a concoction of boundless creativity, and whatever ideas it presents, it does so with an exuberant and totally free spirit.

But therein lies the true nature of Phil’s genius. From an endless field of fragmented ideas and shattered creativity, he can mend these broken things. Where others would be clueless as to what to do with all the bits and pieces, Phil weaves them together to construct concepts so ludicrous and inspired they couldn’t possibly have been made by anyone else.

Obviously, not everything within an 80 minute album as experimental as this will work. Some things don’t work as intended. Some things are jarring like jumping from a height and crashing your teeth together; good examples of this include the brief trap beat and the ambling dynamics that rarely take and moment to just be.

In the end this is a positive thing though, because in the very nature of its unbound and free-thinking methods, it binds the album together in a consistent tone. If you stop trying to make sense of things and allow yourself to follow along in the twists and turns of Phil’s mind, you’re in for a ride unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before.

MOUNT EERIE - NIGHT PALACE

RATING - 9.6/10

FAVORITE TRACK - November Rain

GENRE - Alt/Indie, Folk, Ambience, Haunt