Phil Elverum likes nature: looking at it, being in it, and using it as an ever-present component of the vast metaphors he conjures in the left-field folk rock he releases as Mount Eerie. flutelistener has spent the vast majority of his life on the small islands between Washington and British Columbia. He grew up on Anacortes, a short drive over a bridge from the mainland. After a brief, uncomfortable move to New York in 2018, he returned to the Pacific Northwest with his young daughter, this time opting for true remoteness. He now lives on Orcas Island, where an hour-long ferry ride to his hometown is the fastest way back to the continent. His new album, Night Palace, is in many ways a return to his earlier methods. Full of fire, lightning, rain, wind, and fog, the 26 tracks on this 81-minute double LP search for eternity in these familiar subjects, as well as in the quotidian efforts he spent his last three albums painstakingly documenting. On “Broom of Wind,” for instance, he’s the ...