Night Palace is a welcome addition to the impressive catalog of Mount Eerie, but it’s not an exceptional piece of this mythology.

Mount Eerie’s first studio album in five years is certainly palatial. Night Palace’s 26 tracks run 80 minutes long and contain a wealth of detail, spaciousness, and ornate features to sit with and absorb. It’s a sprawling effort that encompasses many of the textures and themes we’ve heard in previous releases: foreboding textures, verses that dance on the border of melodic and spoken word, the awe of the natural world, sombre atmospheres. This album is Mount Eerie’s most playful to date. It’s not playful in the sense of being light-hearted or joyful, but rather in the array of styles and subjects contained through its runtime. (Although if you must have a giddy version of Phil Elverum, I highly recommend watching the YouTube video of him performing Lil Wayne’s “Get Money” at karaoke)

“Swallowed Alive” is essentially a grindcore song, replete with screams and frantic drumming. Phil’s daughter is the the one doing the yelling here, and she also provides the song’s only lyrics: “You get swallowed by the lion / Swallowed alive / And you live to tell the tale.” Haunting stuff. Elverum’s affection for his daughter shines on the following track, “My Canopy.” This gentle number is a straightforward message of hope and love toward her. Neither of these songs is a minute long, and they contain significant variance in sonics and in substance.

The listener is also treated to some now-classic Mount Eerie experiences regarding nature. “Empty Paper Towel Roll” is as conventional of a rock song that we might hear from Mount Eerie. It’s progressive, quick, enjoyable, and espouses wonder of the outdoors. The album’s midpoint is a 3-song stretch, each with animals in their titles. The latter track of this trio is “I Spoke with a Fish,” a mildly auto-tuned confessional that concludes with a brief sample from a Coen brothers film, which provides some uncharacteristic deadpan humor.

The second half of Night Palace features some of its strongest moments. “Co-Owner of Trees” is an uptempo rocker that ponders private property and what it deeply means to “own land.” One can theoretically own the ground and the trees that rise from it, but the sky and air above it cannot be owned. Elverum correctly concludes that he’s temporary (as we all are), and as such can only really borrow the land and its resources. The verses soon give way to frenetic drums, and then a prolonged distortion, allowing the song to drift away like smoke from a bonfire.

“Myths Come True” is a glitchy jaunt, punctuated with sparse bass hits. Elverum is noting clear parallels with Greek legends and the mundane aspects of modern life (ferry rides, a FedEx truck, a headlamp). The spoken word poetry works surprisingly well alongside the electronic blips and simple rhythms. 

Night Palace is not without its missteps. “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” has a driving beat, overlaid with wailing pads, organ tones, and a very fuzzed-out guitar. Musically it’s one of the album’s more intriguing tracks, but lyrically it’s nothing special. Although it’s pertinent to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, Elverum doesn’t make any unique or revelatory points here. Yes, indigenous names for places within the USA have been overridden. Yes, Americans are unquestionably living on stolen land. And yes, so many of us want to see this old order destroyed and replaced with a better world. Perhaps these direct messages about decolonization will inform some who aren’t familiar with the concept, but for this listener there was no insight to be gained.

The album’s penultimate song, “Demolition,” is ambitious but underwhelming. The 12-minute affair is extremely autobiographical, and in plain spoken word touches upon darkness, revisiting old pains, landlords, becoming numb to atrocities, the military, impermanence, and more. A large portion of this thin and spacious track is devoted to a meditation retreat, and Elverum details both skepticism and solace from the experience. Wind howls through the entire length of the song, giving it a cold and grey shroud. Ultimately, I found “Demolition” to be rambling and unfocused.

Night Palace is an amalgamation of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the meditative and the cacophonous, the natural world and the destruction wrought by Western colonization, brevity and elongation. The work tries to do so many things and although the results are largely positive, it doesn’t quite excel at any of them.

Still, it’s an essential album for the Mount Eerie fan, but I’d recommend that a new listener begin with some of the previous releases. For lyrical mastery and themes of grief, I’d begin with A Crow Looked at Me or Dawn: Winter Journal. My personal favorite full-length of Mount Eerie’s is Wind’s Poem, but bear in mind that I favor ambient- and drone-inspired soundscapes more than acoustic guitar songs in the singer-songwriter mold. Night Palace is a welcome addition to the impressive catalog of Mount Eerie, but it’s not an exceptional piece of this mythology.