In a culture dominated by high energy and short-attention spans, Phil Everum’s band Mount Eerie commands us to be still and listen. No more is this visible than “Demolition,” the 12-minute penultimate song on the record, which consists of hypnotic drones, wind sounds, claps of wood blocks, and stream-of-consciousness poetry from Elverum. This song serves as a thematic microcosm for Mount Eerie’s 2024 record Night Palace as a whole.
Elverum and Mount Eerie performed at the Warsaw in Brooklyn on November 19th, celebrating the release of their latest double LP, Night Palace. The record spans 26 songs, nearly an hour and a half, with only four singles having been released prior. Now on Mount Eerie’s 11th studio album, Elverum also found success with his previous band The Microphones, with their final project being a 44 minute song released in 2020 after a 17 year hiatus.
In “Demolition”, wind howls, birds chirp, then in comes a screeching sound, similar to a siren. It’s loud, it’s terrifying, it’s overwhelming. Then, a droning organ, harmonizing with it, giving context to the sound, allowing it to become beautiful somehow. Guitars strum occasionally, with an occasional hit of a bass drum or a clap of wood blocks. Phil sings a few lines, then begins to speak.
“I wake up in the still, deep dark.”
Phil’s lyrics are typically unbeholden to rhyme scheme and littered with metaphor – yet all are sung. “Demolition” differs from this, though, allowing Phil to speak to his audience directly and freely. During the performance, the fifth track they played that night, the room stood silent and still, allowing each word to linger in the meditative atmosphere they had created. Phil’s right hand held a transcript of the poem, while the left hand motioned freely, a guitar strapped around his neck. Occasionally, he would raise his hand to cue his three other band members to strum with him, allowing physical communication to take charge over the nonexistent time signature. I felt an urge to close my eyes, and I must not have been the only one to, losing myself completely in the noise.
Phil Elverum is deeply personal in all of his music. Perhaps his most personal project is Mount Eerie’s 2017 album A Crow Looked at Me, written in the wake of Phil’s wife passing away from cancer, leaving Phil to care for their one-and-a-half year old daughter. Lyrics in this record pierce the heart, such as these from the track “Seaweed,” “And I poured out your ashes on [a chair] / I guess so you can watch the sunset / But the truth is I don’t think of that dust as you / You are the sunset.” Night Palace and “Demolition” continue this emotional intimacy. Phil is the clear speaker of the “Demolition” poem, using the first person throughout. “I am 46,” he says, “I have so many hopes.” Then, in “Demolition’s” seventh verse, Phil speaks about a meditation retreat he attended: “I slept a few sleep hours in total black, my tent loud with indecipherable night wind through the old forest.” The wind that has been howling for the duration of the song places us there, in the tent next to him, hearing what he hears, thinking what he thinks.
The word “colonization” appears in numerous songs in the record, many times reflecting how America is regarded as home, yet it was not our home to begin with. Mount Eerie performed the song “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” before “Demolition,” a song which touches upon similar themes, sparking the audience to respond with chants of “Free Palestine!” In “Demolition,” he references genocides and the climate directly: “I sing my little songs in a burning time of nature / And woman-denying authoritarian landlords / Of numbed-out spectators glazing over the genocides / Privileged and healthy for the moment while seas rise.”
In my favorite lines in the song, Phil reflects on the passage of time. Both the future… “I watch the islands over the water and wonder if maybe someday my daughter’s grand-daughter will be old here, healed and grateful.”…And the past: “Only ten thousand years ago there were meadows here / A short two-day walk to what’s now ‘Mainland’, bison bones in the kelp.”
So much has already happened, and so much has yet to exist, all in the same place.
