Music always carries memory – of other songs, of beats and melodies and the where-and-when of how they imprinted themselves on us. “You were singing at twilight/With your fingers moving/And I’d heard the same song in a dream,” sings Phil Elverum on “Huge Fire,” near the beginning of his epic new album Night Palace, “I sing it now to myself/I carry it into the night/I walk and there’s a fire, but it’s at my back.” The indie-rock lifer behind the Mount Eerie moniker delivers those lines over clattering, clipped cymbal crashes, like an Eighties new wave hit spun backwards on vinyl, until a wave of static washes them away.
Night Palace is a thorny, beautifully soul-searching record clocking in at 80-plus minutes, and it’s full of memories like this, yanked into the now with the immediacy of a performance on Zoom or Oda — the livestreaming project Elverum helped spearhead during the pandemic’s early years. The album’s noise-swarms recall My Bloody Valentine in its Sisyphusian battle against the abyss. And it echoes the distressed indie-rock Low began making in 2018 with Double Negative and co-leader Alan Sparhawk’s new solo album, born after the death of his wife and bandmate, Mimi Parker.
Elverum experienced similar loss in 2015 when his wife Geneveive — who’d just given birth to their child and was still in her mid 30s — died of pancreatic cancer. And Night Palace builds a similar vernacular of healing from noise-damaged songcraft, a lexicon of musical remembering and also forgetting, because time decays memory in a way that’s mirrored by these fractured and fragmented recordings.
There are moments of tender clarity and wonder on Night Palace, like the single “I Saw Another Bird,” furthering a new subgenre of songs (see Mercury Rev’s soaring “A Bird of No Address”) about the winged creatures we re-discovered when CoVid lockdowns gave us time to notice them. There’s the joyous squalls of “Writing Poems,” which wouldn’t feel out of place on The Glow Pt. 2, Elverum’s 2001 album as The Microphones, a touchstone that’s inspired a generation of artists (including the late Lil Peep, who sampled it) and which this album resembles its sprawling Pacific Northwest animism.
But fear and terror coexist here with the flickering moments of bliss. The 51-second “Swallowed Alive” is a blast of shrieking and din, with Elverum’s kid Agathe speaking the only lyrics (“You get swallowed by the lion/Swallowed alive/and live to tell the tale”). The horror is societal as well as personal, as “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” makes clear with a minimum of metaphors: “Now we live in the wreckage of a colonizing force/whose racist poison still flows … Let this old world shatter and transform/ Allegiance to nothing at all but the burning present moment.”
The record often feels like a dialogue with a child, or a time capsule for them to open when they’re older, alternately gutting and heartwarming, mimicking the mercurial, inchoate nature of memory. It glimpses horrors, present and future, reckons with privilege and guilt, acknowledges the dumb plodding procession of everyday life and how imagination allows us to put fear, shame and sadness to positive use, to build collective exorcisms. By the end, on “Demolition,” Elverum has pared things down to just guitar arpeggios and recitation, a narrative of downward spiral that should be familiar to anyone facing reality these days, and an account of a meditation retreat that provides some relief.
In the end, hope shines through. The album is frequently uneasy listening, and notwithstanding the occasional earworm or guitar solo (see “I Walk”), doesn’t work that well with divided attention. But give yourself over to it as an experience, it will likely provide comfort, move you to empathy, and maybe even spur you to action.