It feels like an eternity ago that I last saw Phil Elverum's Mount Eerie perform live. It was back in 2019, only a few months before the pandemic would shut things down for a while. It was also at Thalia Hall, the same venue I saw the band perform at earlier this month. I've been listening to Mount Erie for what the calendar tells me is decades now, so when I saw them back in 2019 I wasn't surprised that it was a seated show or that the crowd skewed older. At that time he was coming off Lost Wisdom pt. 2, his second collaborative album with Julie Doiron and his third album detailing his life after the death of his wife. That album alongside A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only are heartbreaking works and the mood for that December show was understandably somber.
This time things were little be different. Immediately I was struck by how it was not a seated show and the crowd skewed much, much younger. But some things thankfully remained the same like he seemingly never ending line pouring out of Thaila Hall's merch room where Elverum sat as his own merch guy, talking with the fans as they purchased their albums, shirts and posters; and Mount Eerie's penchant for incredible songwriting finding another peak in Night Palace.
The night started off with a pair of incredible sets from Precious Bane (who later performed as part of Mount Eerie) and Hana Stretton. Precious Bane's set started things off with a slow ambient vibe as their beautiful voice peaked through the dense fog of the droning guitar. Stretton followed up with a meditative set of her own, evoking her home life in Australia where she tends to an idyllic little society of cows. Her songs were underscored by the sounds of nature and people quietly living their lives, blending with her fantastic songwriting. These two sets were honesty the most peaceful I've felt in a long while.
Elverum is touring in support of his longest album to date, Night Palace, which sees him reseting a bit after the aforementioned run of melancholic works. At just over 80 minutes, Night Palace has Elvirum embracing every facet of his nearly 30 years of musicianship. The songs range from absurd ("I Spoke to a Fish") to haunting ("I Hear Whales") to politically charged ("Non-Metaphorical Decolonization") to calmly self aware of the absurdity of existence ("Co-Owner of Trees"). His music is as beautiful as ever, maintaining an equilibrium between the gentle sparseness of his voice and the varied instrumentation that imbues this collection of songs with more the complexity than most other musician could only hope for.
The night's setlist focused almost entirely on Night Palace, save for the Ella Langley cover "weren't for the wind". However with 26 tracks not every track got it's moment of glory. We didn't get to lose our minds to the the short, monstrous, and sonically dissonant rage of "Swallowed Alive". Rather we were treated to the more straight forward cuts for the album, if that is something that can even be said of Elverum's work. I mean we got bask in the vastness of the 12 minute long spoken word "Demolition".
The evening flow was carefully assembled, vacillating between the idealized indie rock gem "Broom of Wind" and softer tracks like "I Need New Eyes". There was a beautiful balance as the free and raw instrumentation of "Huge Fire" ran into the folkiness of "November Rain" very well. There is a general freedom of genre in his work and especially on Night Palace that the evening was determined to uphold and did so quite elegantly. The night came to a close with "Stone Woman Gives Birth to a Child at Night", the song on the album that see Elverum lament the state of the world. "I never meant to pretend there's another world apart from this one we're in, but I was briefly adrift in a night sky before being re-immersed in this endless et cetera" he sings knowing that we can't ignore the harshness of our current climate. But for those brief hours that the crowd was at Thalia Hall, we were thankfully far away from that endless et cetera, but ready to eventually go back and try our best to make it better.
All photos by Julian Ramirez.