This week Mount Eerie released a new album, ‘Night Palace’, the first he has signed under his current alias in five years. Phil Elverum’s revival of his original project, The Microphones, produced an album in 2020, ‘Microphones in 2020’. Mount Eerie’s last album, ‘Lost Wisdom Pt. 2’, was released in 2019.
Bringing up The Microphones on the new Mount Eerie album makes more sense this time than it seems, since it is said that ‘Night Palace’ is a kind of second part of ‘The Glow pt. 2’ (2001), the best album than The Microphones. They are similar in length and method, since both reach or exceed 20 tracks – the new LP contains 26 – traveling through various styles.
There is lo-fi, distortion and pastoral balladry, among other things, in ‘Night Palace’, an album that Elverum has re-recorded with analog methods from his own studio, located in the forest. ‘I Walk’ is one of their best tracks and today’s Song Of The Day.
‘I Walk’ has been one of the singles taken from ‘Night Palace’. It is also one of the key moments of the album. In ‘I Walk’, Elverum “walks” towards catharsis, moving from confusion to liberation. This journey is represented in the composition of ‘I Walk’, which begins sparsely, with Elverum barely audible under the instrumentation, and then comes to a head with the emergence of a passage of distorted guitars that demand all the attention.
In ‘I Walk’ Elverum narrates a journey of personal evolution. He sings that “generational”, family, vital expectations weigh him down, and that his head is like a “city of thoughts that never end.” But as soon as Elverum sets foot in nature, his thoughts “clear” and his “ego” “dissolves.” Suddenly he is one with the world. A new beginning opens before him.
