When we named Palm as a band to watch this year, I compared their music to fractals — unending sets of patterns that radiate out from a song’s basic structure to create limitless iterations of its initial sound. Trading Basics is as inventive and daring as a debut can be, somehow managing to syphon a small fragment of Palm’s often improvisational, mathy live shows into something cohesive and inviting for first-time listeners
Palm’s debut LP, Trading Basics, finds the Philly art-rockers just barely inching towards a pop center from a dense, instrumental wilderness. Odd, floating vocal bits now serve as rounded safety stoppers on their jutting, overlain guitar lines. Still, Palm lean in to their complications, sounding effortful but not labored, and never careful. It’s math-rock, more or less, but they run too hot for it to ever feel studious.
The Fat Angel Sings 