Feedback and distortion are all we have. Receive the wise words of someone who knows our work better than we do. Rip their advice apart. Turn it into the droning and cold speculation of self-doubt. Those loud whirrs heard in the opening moments of this latest album from Mount Eerie gets it. Night Palace is a place where an intoxicating lack of self-belief is challenged by monumentally refined instrumental scope. Belief and faith are interlinked and for Mount Eerie it means Night Palace is an intimate opportunity to reveal everything he can. “So what if no one ever finds this notebook,” he ends his title track with. There lies the joy and frankness of Mount Eerie, an artist who writes as though nobody is reading, and performs like nobody is watching. One of the few artists with no mask for his audience lets rip on another stunning piece.
Through those moments of wild distortion, as heard on Huge Fire, there is still a moment for soft bass riffs and contemplative and reactionary lyrical choices. A high tenor battles the lower strokes of instrumental excess, often verging on gothic or macabre in their intonation. Should they be any louder they would prove grating – but such is the fine balance struck on Night Palace, that it feels comforting. Familiar, even. Let those wash over before the first of many carnage-driven, noise-rock implementations. Swallowed Alive is the litmus test for whether the haunting intricacies are for you. Night Palace balances the genre blurs exceptionally well but in not holding back, in bearing witness to all these genre styles, struggles to balance its tone at times. The out-of-nowhere approach those darker elements bring is not as powerful as the boundary-pushing layers of Broom of Wind but certainly helps highlight them as the finer moments of Night Palace.
Challenging a listener is part of the charm for Mount Eerie. (soft air) is anything but what its title would suggest. These are not the gusts of wind which blow us towards a flourishing next step. Life is not so easy. Night Palace is buoyed by realism. Spots of excellence are frequent for Mount Eerie – and much of Night Palace works because of how different it all feels, how sudden the shifts are yet how natural it feels. Tender acoustics mark a whole evolution on Blurred World, a song which feels lightyears away from the rough and distorted opening bars of this album. Such is the joy of Mount Eerie, who keeps listeners guessing but also keeps them tethered to his point. How we heal and adapt to the characteristics or shortcomings of others is a spectrum, a spectrum defined by the instrumental variety here.
Weep, scream and style your way through the turmoil of Night Palace. It is an exceptional breach and release. A moving and yet inarticulate piece which flitters through the deck of cards which mark our memories. Whatever comes through, the randomised and infectious wonders of this Mount Eerie performance are worthy of your time. Night Palace must be respected for its ambition, its detail in sound and the construct of its flow. Every choice is a noble one, every effort a bold desire to get to grips with the often-erratic noise and doubt of our lives. We see these shortcomings as ruinous, but often it can be imitable and ridiculous, as the darker flow of I Spoke With a Fish finds. Those lighter, dreamier moments are where the true beauty of Night Palace is found, and there is plenty of that within.
A nihilistic attitude comes through and in turn, feels questionable for the other avenues of optimism present in this genre. But it is the ballast that is needed to those upbeat promises, the hollow words of artists saying everything will work out in the end. Mount Eerie struggles with this hopeful lie and guns for the reality, the breach of what makes us unique is not individualism but based on memory. What we remember defines our future because it shapes our ambition, our dreams and how we perceive the worries of not mattering, of being a blink in the eye of the universe. It is all too easy to discard such large proclamations, the genuine fear often spreads too thin and comes across as hokey or embarrassing. Not Night Palace, which comes closer than many to understanding why we seek more when contentment is replaced by contempt.
