Night Palace, Mount Eerie (8/10)

Definitely one of my most highly anticipated albums of the year, Phil Elverum dropped his most recent Mount Eerie LP on 11/1/24 w his record label, P.W. Elverum & Sun. I love love loved the singles "I Walk" and "I Saw Another Bird," so I was really hyped for this drop. I'm also just a huge Elverum fan - "The Glow, Pt. 2" is definitely in contention for my top album of all time. Anyways, I was mostly impressed by this! In classic Phil fashion, it's a pretty long album coming in at 1hr 21 min w 26 songs. Usually this would be a huge turn off for me, but he has enough credit that I'll do it for him. I feel like Elverum just does this combination of noise and folk that is so unusual and amazing and I love and also I think this it just feels so accurate to the dystopian mood of the world right now. He really embraces the noise in this album, which I am really happy about. Only things I'm contending w are moments that border on a little "woke"y for me like the song "Non-metaphorical Decolonization," which I keep going back and forth on. Obviously, I believe in non-metaphorical decolonization and all the ideas he talks about, and I do think the noise in the song works really well/it is important for someone w power to be explicit, but it just felt to me like it wasn't actually taking the idea and doing that much w it if that makes sense. For me w poetry, I try to take ideas I'm interested in and contend w them in a very real way, and Phil talking about the racism of America felt a bit surface-level to me. That said, I really believe he is an amazing person who has supported lots of great causes, so this isn't really a contention w his beliefs but just the way they manifest sometimes in the album (other times, I think there's such real recknoning happening). But that song does have great guitar so I keep going back and forth lol. Anyways, super happy w this album generally and happy he's still putting out great music. Favorite tracks: I Walk, Co-Owner of Trees, I Need New Eyes

Also! Such great field recordings/ambient/sampling