Dried roses #5: Mount Eerie, More Eaze
Authoritarian landlords, previous feelings.
Dried roses my semi-weekly roundup of music, new and old, that I've recently enjoyed. Although sometimes there is just only one album I really, really want to talk about.
It was like a blanket had been thrown atop my birdcage. We’d turned back the clock that night; I was working at the record store that afternoon, and as soon as it was 5pm and dark, I felt a deep, deep sleep take hold of me. We're in the home stretch, I thought. It'll be closing time soon. It'll be 2025 soon.
Yesterday I submitted my album top-10 for OOR, and whereas last year that moment took me by surprise, I was happy to see it coming this time around. I know there's two months remaining in the year, whatever. Let's go into slumber, come up again on the other side. We're done.
Musically, that means I've been re-immersing myself in the many albums bubbling at the bottom of my top-10. (More on that soon, I'm sure.) It also means I'm drawn again to music out of time. I've been listening to Frank Sinatra's Last Great Album Watertown, predicting a long Sinatra winter. I've returned to a playlist I made a while ago, Previous feelings, with songs, jazz standards mostly, expressing the kinds of sentiments that no longer seem to exist. The heartaches of yesteryear.
(Just for balance, in this same period, I've also gotten really into the remix of 'Guess'.)
Mount Eerie - Night Palace
There are echoes of The Glow Pt. 2 (2001) on Phil Elverum's latest album Night Palace. It's an hour-plus epic, covering a range of genres, steeped in natural imagery, and sometimes in a quite intertextual conversation with his critical breakthrough (see 'The Gleam, Pt. 3'). But he was 22 then, and he's 46 now. What stands out most on Night Palace is what's changed.
For one, Elverum seems to want to distance himself somewhat from his 'sad nature guy' reputation. When I interviewed him [for OOR], he told me: "I write these songs that could easily be taken as beautiful, mystical, magical, like you say. And I could see how that could function as escapism, and that's a bummer to me. I don't want to just be soothing, escapist entertainment. At the same time, I also do not want to be a sledgehammer of reality. Like, 'Here, you little shits, deal with this. The world sucks, and it's harsh. DEAL WITH IT!' Somewhere in between those two things I want to make something that's transcendent and grounded at the same time."
There's songs on Night Palace about 'Non-Metaphorical Decolonization', about the wealth disparity on his home island, the home owners on Orcas who lay claim to air, beach and firewood. Yes, he's meditating more than ever, and yes, he talks to birds and fish, but you will walk away from this album thinking about all the 'authoritarian landlords' who seek to dominate this planet and all its human and non-human inhabitants.
Crucially, Elverum's 'the world sucks' sentiment is not one of self-pity, not anymore. This is a largely selfless album, made by someone who's already "written enough about himself"; someone who's found peace in his personal life, has built his own house, spends most of his time single parenting his daughter and nurturing his little piece of land. He "used to dream that [his] roots were strong and deep"; now, he laughs "at [himself] and this scrap of identity scraped from the thinnest soil of recent history."
It's probably too soon for superlatives [though I'm pretty confident that 'Myths Come True' to 'Co-Owner of Trees' is the best sequence of songs on any album this year], but Night Palace is kind of all I want from art at this point. It's elaborate but not self-indulgent; it's idiosyncratic and subjective but without the hyper-individuality that plagues so much of contemporary 'pop' music; it's moody but not melancholic; its experimental form is purposeful, its activism clear-eyed but not oppressively didactic. Indeed, it's "transcendent and grounded at the same time". An endlessly rich album with which to weather the November rain.
Wildflowers
More Eaze - lacuna and parlor. Experimental composer and San Antonio native Mari Maurice had "literally hundreds of reasons to not be in Texas” and last year, the rampant anti-gay and anti-trans legislation in her home state prompted her to finally flee to New York. lacuna and parlor was made there, from drafts she could never quite complete in Austin. Perhaps surprisingly, it's full of pedal steel and ambient americana, of which Maurice says: “I tried to reject my roots in [americana], but I actually feel more free to embrace that side of things since leaving Texas. It is deeper and stranger than what a lot of people take it as. It is a very weird and Lynchian type of thing when you start to unpack it."
Back to Phil Elverum for a minute. Consequence asked him about 10 records he spins while cooking and eating dinner. Anyone who saw his mini documentary, in which he listens to My Bloody Valentine ("I love Valentine??") while driving his daughter to school, will not be surprised that it's a very, uh, out there list. One of the highlights is an album that Elverum's daughter calls "beef stew music"; a 1950s recording of minimalist piano pieces originally composed by the Armenian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff. My favorite discovery from the article is a 2004 album by Australian avant-gardist Oren Ambarchi, Grapes from the Estate, which, for half of its hour-long runtime, sounds like its just sub-harmonic test tones. Just so you're prepared if you ever find yourself going over for dinner at the Elverum house.