Monolith Cocktail Blog

Partnership with the leading Italian culture/music site and platform Kalporz. Words by Samuel Conficoni. Translation by Dominic Valvona

The Monolith Cocktail shares posts from our Italian pen pals Kalporz each month. A hangover from 2024, Samuel Conficoni reviews the new Mount Eerie album, Night Palace.

Mount Eerie, “Night Palace”
(P.W. Elverum & Sun)

Phil Elverum‘s return under the moniker of Mount Eerie is a double album full of shadows and fog; a dark and mysterious work that looks at the clear sky that we can see in the distance through our binoculars from a due distance and with a certain disillusionment. Monumental and sweetly chaotic, Night Palace is a manifesto of poetics that embraces Phil Elverum’s entire career both as Microphones and as Mount Eerie, the culmination of a climax that now becomes the summa and at the same time the rite of passage of an artistic path that is always courageous and fascinating.

Five years after the collaborative album with Julie Doiron and six years after Now Only, Phil Elverum returns with a double album that moves around the underworld of the human psyche for eighty minutes, trying to re-emerge from the abyss and the fog in which it is born and develops, proceeding on this dirt road with conviction and sincere dedication. Elverum’s production from the monumental A Crow Looked at Me onwards is above all a painful retracing and analysis of the losses that mark us without ever ceasing, however, to be enchanted by the beauty of the world around us and by our difficulty in describing and understanding it. This is why flashes of light are never lacking. Here Elverum, as he has done many times before, asks questions of himself and his own art, trying to investigate what he is and what his music is. After twenty-five years he is still in fieri, he is still moving, he is still uncertain about what to do and where to go.

This wonderful and honest research is present, in a scattered but continuous way, on Night Palace. The imaginative and immersive atmospheres that he paints, so different from each other and all so bewitching, end up trapping the listener and dragging him into a scenic part that involves and alienates him at the same time. Despite this, or perhaps, indeed, precisely because of this, the music of Night Palace sounds direct and fascinating. There are some of Elverum’s sweetest and most emotional songs, such as “Broom of Wind” and “I Saw Another Bird”, both on the first album, that walk in a magma of sounds and enveloping notes. Also standing out on the first part of the album are the gems “I Walk”, which reaffirms Elverum as a singer-songwriter with a unique style and lyrical and melodic abilities, the concise and elegant “Blurred World” and the caustic lo-fi of “Huge Fire”, where Elverum sings that “Nothing but me and all this shattered wood I’ve been pulling / Into a heap of flames and smoke: this is my life.”

The desperate attempt to want to live in that condition of serenity and security that is only proper to gods and wise men, that stoic ataraxia so difficult to achieve, is longed for and sought far and wide by Night Palace. Everywhere, however, it clashes with the tragedies that have always afflicted human beings, such as disease, death, fear and loneliness. The second album seems like a battle cry against these gigantic obstacles and the many injustices that blight the lives of individuals and humanity as a whole. The cries of deliberate chaos of “Breaths” are soon swallowed up by the sobs of “Swallowed Alive”: a certain bloody folk-rock that had already emerged on the first part of the album finds even more space now. The ghosts of the Native Americans on whose genocide the nation in which Elverum was born and raised was built haunt him, and he wants to be a sincere and faithful ally.

The thunderous and disconcerting “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization”, clearly constructed as a diptych, leaves you astonished and almost scared. The same vibrations are also emanated by the sharp and hypnotic “Co-Owner of Trees”, whose electric guitars immediately become suffocating and disturbing. “Now we live in the wreckage of a colonizing force / Whose racist poison still flows”, Elverum sings as if he were reciting a sort of spell. The cathartic power of these songs lets the force of nature enter them: on these songs Elverum tries to reconcile the diabolical seductions towards an inevitable nihilism dictated by the facts with the possibility of taking another direction, more complex and more combative, to rebuild and start again. Whether it is the brief but important presence of his daughter in a song or the pieces dedicated to his new partner, Elverum catalyses the past, present and future around himself and on Night Palace, placing them in a proactive and far-reaching dialogue: a journey in which, fortunately, nothing is already written. (80/100) Samuel Conficoni