ElveruMania Feat. Daniel Bromfield

From the guys that brought you Stereogum and Pitchfork's reviews of Mount Eerie's new album comes: even more Mount Eerie content.

I'm back from an unannounced monthlong Inbox Infinity drought. This newsletter is fun but it makes me next to no money, so I chose to devote all of October's writing time to a handful of paid reviews. I covered Wild Pink's heavy heartland rocker Dulling The Horns and Undeath's acrobatically gruesome More Insane for Pitchfork, and Mount Eerie's Night Palace for Stereogum. The extended time I spent with all three albums was enjoyable across the board, but whereas I felt like I neatly closed the book on the first two in a pair of sub-1000-word writeups, I submitted my comparatively gargantuan Mount Eerie review with a cloud of unaddressed opinions still lingering in my brain.

Night Palace is longer than the Wild Pink and Undeath albums combined, so obviously there's more to chew on. Add in my overly sentimental, indulgent Mount Eerie attachment that stems from sharing a hometown with Phil Elverum, and you've got a sure recipe for logorrhea.

Thankfully, Daniel Bromfield's Pitchfork review, published a few days later, filled in what I saw as the obvious gaps in mine. Daniel's the best. We'd followed each other on Twitter for a while by the time we first hung out in Summer 2021, which coincidentally was right around when both of us got our first Pitchfork bylines. Since then, I've written 22 reviews for the site. Daniel's written 69. Dude is a machine. In particular, his ability to analyze ambient music—a genre I often enjoy but even more often find impossible to critique—is remarkable.

In our subsequent, sporadic meetings over the years, we've spent hours talking about Phil Elverum's music. I DM'd Daniel the second I finished my first Night Palace listen—mostly to determine whether I should even bother pitching a Pitchfork review (my assumption was right, Daniel had already secured it), but also because I was genuinely curious about his thoughts.

Yesterday, we hopped on the phone in a foolhardy attempt to clear up the album's many loose ends. So here you have it: two Elverum obsessives fumbling towards unobtainable answers. You've been warned.

Inbox Infinity: What’s up man? First question I have for you is: is recorded music really a statue of a waterfall?

Daniel Bromfield: I think that depends on whether you're a fish or not.

I guess that's right. Anyways, in previous conversations, we were both stoked that our respective reviews covered such different ground. Yours focused more on the actual music and I gravitated more towards the lyrics and the larger scope of Phil's career. What initial impression did the music leave on you?

The first thing that struck me was how much harder [Night Palace] rocked. I mean, he's done rock songs before—on Sauna, he was going towards this grungy sound that I associate with a more classic strain of Pacific Northwest indie rock. But it still sounded like a studio thing—you know, kind of flimsy in a way that was endearing. It wasn't bad, but then you’ve got “Huge Fire,” where the bass is just so heavy, and I haven't ever heard anything like that on a Mount Eerie record before.

It's crazy, because Sauna was the last album Phil recorded at The Unknown, which is a huge room with great acoustics. Ever since then he's been doing all of this stuff, I believe, just at home. But it really does sound fuller than Sauna. 

How do you see the Night Palace connecting, or not connecting, sonically? It's a pretty varied album, and it jumps around a lot. Do you think that’s in service of the whole, or that it detracts from anything?

I think it really works. It definitely is very wide-ranging, but there's not much on it that I feel like he hasn't done before to some degree. I mean, it's not like the White Album where he's like, ‘I'm gonna try like, Music Hall, or I'm going to do a Ska song,’ or whatever. The only song that really felt double album-y in that way was “I Spoke With A Fish.” The auto-tune, the trap beat, the Big Lebowski sample—that's the kind of shit you expect from someone's like, ‘Fuck it, let's do whatever’ double album. That's also the point where I feel like Night Palace stops being this really beautiful nature epic, and starts going into its own footnotes and appendices.

What was your entry point with Phil's music?

I was actually trying to remember the other night whether I heard Clear Moon or The Glow Pt. 2 first. I definitely had downloaded The Glow Pt. 2 when I was in high school, just because I knew it was this super acclaimed album. So I remember skipping around and not really thinking much of it. But I don't remember if that was before or after Clear Moon came out. It was definitely those two, though.

I remember when Clear Moon got Best New Music, and I don't think I was super familiar with him then, but I just connected with it right away. I really liked the things he was singing about. I feel a strong spiritual connection to my hometown and the nature around it—you know, there's fog, it's on the coast. It's not Anacortes, but it's definitely a rugged West Coast landscape. It was one of the first times I heard an artist sing about those kinds of things, about nature and about feeling a connection and awe—that sort of spirituality that comes from being in nature and being humbled by your surroundings. It really spoke to me. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I remember having conversations with you in years past where it seemed like Phil kind of lost you for a bit there when he was, if not actively backtracking on that kind of natural spiritualism, then brushing it off as youthful and unimportant compared to other things that he was going through.

I mean, I never stopped keeping up with his music, but definitely. It's a difficult thing to talk about from a critical standpoint, because on the one hand, I completely understand the sentiment and I understand why he would feel that way. That feeling is a really crucial part of the music that he made from 2017 through 2020. But at the same time, it's painful to hear him act like this music that I have a very strong connection to was somehow immature, or the product of a naïve, untrained mind. To some extent, it makes me wonder how much my appreciation for metaphorical transcendence has to do with the fact that I haven't suffered a shattering loss in my life. 

Furthermore, he was going towards these austere arrangements, and that was underwhelming to me too, because it was like, ‘Okay, is he gonna reject this fantastic beauty that he's capable of conjuring?’ Like okay, he wanted it to be really stripped down because it’s unvarnished, unpoetic music that's communicating some truth. But you know, he also did do it with his wife's instruments, and he’s still using the crow to some degree as a metaphor—like, that is art and he can't really escape it. I felt like by trying to escape it, he was shooting himself in the foot. 

And by the time of Microphones In 2020, I was like 'Okay, he's rejecting his old music.' But what's the alternative? Is it just going to be him making music about how much he doesn't like his old music? And now that I hear Night Palace, I think I actually am a little more appreciative of those albums, in part because I just didn't know if he would ever do something like this again. And even though I still feel like he has this instinct to sabotage his own work a little bit, I find it relieving that he's finding a sort of reconciliation between his new perspectives.

In your review, you talk about Night Palace’s relationship to poetry, which I found very interesting. Phil recites poetry, he writes entire songs about poetry. And then you just called A Crow Looked At Me “unpoetic”—

Actually, thinking back on it, he did put the poem that the album’s named after on the cover of A Crow Looked At Me. So obviously he wasn't totally anti-poetry during that time, but it almost speaks more to a loosening of the self-consciousness of some of his earlier work. He's just allowing himself to exist more as an artist, a creator, a poet, all these many things that he is within this DIY enterprise. It speaks to his creative health and also to his mental health, I think, that he would do something like “Myths Come True” or say something like “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall,” and actually be sincere about it. But still, he's like, ‘[Poetry] only expresses the thing halfway.’ So he's still definitely got this self-consciousness about the fact that he's making art.

What do you see as Night Palace’s biggest flaws?

The main reservation I had with it is that I do feel like the second disc deflated the first a bit. That's why I was reluctant to give it a really high rating, even though, so far, it’s probably my favorite album of the year. When I was first listening to the first disc and hearing things like “I Walk,” I was like, ‘Okay, this might be a 9.5,’ like edge Cindy Lee out. And then by the end, I was like, ‘Okay, this is probably not that.’ Even now, I feel like on the first disc, I'm hearing a nine, and by the time I'm done, I almost feel like I'm hearing a seven. By the end, on “I Need New Eyes,” he's like, “I’ve spent two decades singing this song.” Like, I get it. You've been talking about this for 23 minutes.

Do you feel like the arrangements and instrumentation on the back half are also weaker? Or is it purely the shift in lyrics?

I actually liked that the second half shied away from the moments of really insane beauty that you see on the first. I mean, there are parts on the first half where he's almost going full Brian Wilson and really embracing the Baroque Pop thing, like on “Broom Of Wind,” and “I Walk” where he uses a harpsichord. I feel like he uses the black metal sections in the same way that Brian Wilson would use an orchestral passage. It's when he really needs to push the song into the stratosphere, musically or emotionally—like on the “Wind & Fog” two-part song, at the end of part one where it really explodes. That, to me, felt like a very truthful moment to himself, but also very grand and theatrical.

He shied away from that on the second half, and I think that actually works. You get some of the heaviest shit on that side. You get “Co-Owner Of Trees,” you get these really gnarly grooves. You don't get those magic and pixie dust moments. I thought that was cool. I felt like “Demolition” was maybe a little hokey in its attempt to create a ritual, or be a storyteller around the fire. For some reason the drums on “Stone Woman…” irked me. But other than that, I thought the second half was musically strong, and I liked the way that it contrasted with the first by being heavier, less beautiful, more ragged.

In your review, you cited [2009's] White Stag as the beginning of this thread of writing about Indigenous land, which defines Night Palace’s back half. To be honest, that’s one Mount Eerie album I'm not super familiar with. How does that factor in? How have you seen this subject brought up, even if more opaquely, in Phil’s work before? 

In the past it’s been the metaphorical angle, where instead of talking about people, he might talk about like, a bison or a woolly mammoth, but you get the sense that he's really talking about what came before. I haven't listened to [White Stag] in a while, but that was definitely the first time I was aware of him having a consciousness about that. That's the thing with these American epics, these albums where it's like, ‘Let's talk about my relationship with this land.’ A lot of the really good ones have at least some passing consciousness of the fact that this country was founded on genocide, and that in order to have this city or this place, the original occupants had to be driven out or killed.

Smile by the Beach Boys has that, [Sufjan’s] Illinois has that a little bit, and The Glow Pt. 2 is as much about a breakup as it is about the land. But I think when you get to Clear Moon, the connection to the place itself seems more literal and worth talking about. There's an awareness that he's contributing to the degradation of this land, that he's part of the problem. But I'm glad that he's making it explicit here, because I do think it puts a very interesting wrinkle in the music.

That’s about all I wanted to ask you. Anything you’d like to add?

There's actually one more thing, yeah. I did write this review, and it is a Pitchfork review—the album now has a stamp on it, this number. But I'm still not entirely 100% sure what I think of this album, and I'm still not 100% sure that I get it. This review is a snapshot of a process, so keep that in mind. 

Absolutely. I reread mine last night for the first time since it went up, and I was like, ‘I don't know if I still agree with some of the things I'm saying.’ 

Yeah, that's as much about the album as it is about your review. We’ll probably keep thinking about it for a long time. I don't know if I'll ever really know what it all means. 

I think that's why I like it so much. 

Yeah, you said you left a lot of analysis on the table. And I was like, ‘Damn, you covered a shit-ton.’

I mean, I didn't even mention half of the songs, or get into the way they fit into the whole. I didn't want to do, like, a 6000-word thing, though I could’ve. 

I feel like you have a little more freedom with Stereogum, because you’re not writing as much of a value judgment.

That's why I leaned into a more granular analysis, rather than trying to quote-unquote evaluate it for its strengths. It was fun to approach it from that angle and not have to, as you mentioned, put a definitive stamp on it, as it often feels when writing Pitchfork reviews.

Yeah like, also the [numerical score]. I leaned low because I thought, ‘What's this in relation to my favorite Mount Eerie album,’ which is Clear Moon. They both got the same score. But getting a lower score than the two “death albums” might make people think like, ‘Oh, now he's back to writing about nature, it's not as good as when he's writing about death.’ And that's not at all what's going on.

It feels like too important of a statement, or a course-correction, to even be like, ‘Yeah, it's just a return to form, Phil’s back in the woods.’ 

I was wary of taking the route of like, ‘He's over his wife's death, now he's back to writing about trees.’ That was definitely something that I tried to avoid. 

Daniel Bromfield writes for Pitchfork, Stereogum, and other outlets. He also runs the wildly popular, wildly entertaining Regional American Food Twitter account.

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