Posts Tagged ‘Trading Basics’

PALM – ” Walkie Talkie “

Posted: April 28, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Palm does not write music for passive listening. Out of jagged edges and complex, interlocking pieces, the Philadelphia quartet makes off-kilter art rock that demands — and rewards your full attention. Guitarists and singers Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt write deeply intertwined melodies that seem to bounce off each other with razor-sharp precision; Gerasimos Livitanos‘ twitchy, punctuated bass lines mesh with Hugo Stanley’s hectic, forceful drumming. The overall effect of cohesion is transfixing. It’s immediately evident during a live performance: Often, the band hits on a groove onstage that seems to rely on a law of physics from another planet.

Palm’s 2015 debut album, Trading Basics, sounds like Spirit They’ve Gone-era Avery Tare made by riff-writing math majors. Experimental but precise, curious but composed, the songs feel put together like a Jackson Pollock jigsaw puzzle. Palm’s forthcoming EP, Shadow Expert, hones this sound. Shadow Expert is just as complex, but draws from the band’s sunnier side; the songs are slightly punchier and brighter.

“Walkie Talkie,” the first single from Shadow Expert, is breakneck and bouncy. It’s aptly named: Throughout the track, Kurt’s and Alpert’s guitars alternate in quick, janky riffs, their voices often echoing this pattern. The result feels like messy communication, like a two-way radio stunted by static or emotion.

Palm’s members explain that they have a propensity to deconstruct and reconstruct as they write. The band describes its songwriting process as an exercise in organization as much as creation. “Walkie Talkie,” the band says, was written this way, with the lyrics cut out of magazines — another creative means of organization.

Like much of Palm’s best work, “Walkie Talkie” is busy, but not crowded. It’s a dense collection of ideas that leaves you little room to collect your thoughts; by the time you do, the band has already reconfigured them for you.

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Palm’s new EP, Shadow Expert, comes out June 16th on  Carpark Records . The band goes on a U.S. tour this summer.

PALM – ” Ankles “

Posted: December 18, 2015 in MUSIC
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Palm Trading Basics

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

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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.

PALM – ” Trading Basics “

Posted: November 27, 2015 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Palm

Quadratic equation rock performed by malfunctioning, sputtering appliances, For Fans of: Oxes, Bellini, Guerilla Toss .Like a Beefheart made for loft shows, Philadelphia-based fractal-rock quartet Palm’s sounds improvisational while being rooted in utter precision. On their debut, Trading Basics, guitar parts deconstruct themselves in real time; bass lines dart and duck; drums propel the action while also seeming to comment on it. Vocalist-guitarists Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt’s vocal harmonies add more tension to this outfit’s heady mix. Palm are wrapping up a nationwide tour and are already preparing to head back into the studio and record album Number Two.

They Say: “For the most part, our music starts with a seed, and then we all come together and add our own elements to it,” says Alpert. “It’s important that we’re all doing something, that the song is all of our parts. A lot of times, we like when the rhythm section takes the foreground of a song. We like to deconstruct what a pop song could be, and we like to be pretty jagged in our sound.”

The lurching, churning “Garden” shows off Palm’s ability to create gorgeously realized chaos from ragged pieces.

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