PALM ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM, ROCK ISLAND,OUT 2/9 VIA CARPARK RECORDS
LISTEN TO LEAD SINGLE “PEARLY” ON TOUR NOW
Today, Palm has announced their new album, Rock Island, with a visual for the song “Pearly.” The FADER, who premiered the song and interviewed the band, are saying Palm play “melodically complex art-rock with an abundance of digital and organic textures” that “lead you straight into their magnetic, labyrinthine world.” Rock Island is available pre-order now and due out 2/9 via Carpark Records.
Palm is currently on tour with Girlpool and have announced 2 shows at the new Brooklyn venue, Elsewhere on November 15th and 16th. All dates below.
LISTEN TO “PEARLY“
On Rock Island, their second LP, Palm produces evidence of a distinct musical language, developed over time, in isolation, and out of necessity. On the island, melodies are struck on what might be shells or spines. Rhythms are scratched out, swept over, scratched again. Individual instruments, and sometimes entire sections, skip and stutter. There is the sense of a music box with wonky tension or a warped transmission in which all the noise is taken for signal.
Like other groups so acclaimed for their compulsive live show, Palm has been burdened by the constant comparison between their recorded material and their touring set. On Rock Island, they render this tired discussion moot, using the album form to present that which could never be completely live, reserving for performance that which could never be completely reproduced.
Despite appearing behind the instruments typical of rock music, Palm trades in sounds of their own making. On these songs, one of the guitars and the drum kit are used as MIDI triggers, producing an index that can be combed through later and replaced with new information. The percussion is sometimes augmented so as to suggest a multiplication of limbs. The strings are manipulated to choke, crack, and hum like other instruments, or other bodies, might.
Working again with engineer Matt Labozza, the band spent the better part of a month in a rented farmhouse in Upstate New York. With the benefits of time and space, Palm recorded the various elements piecemeal, only rarely playing together in groups larger than two or three. While some members tracked, others holed up in the next room, experimenting with quantization, beat replacement, and other methods borrowed from electronic music. Even accounting for the many labors that brought them to be, these materials seem produced by an organic logic. Their complex friction forms a habit of thought, scores a network of grooves on the floor of the mind.
This is music with dimensionality. Sonic objects are deployed, developed, and dissected in various states of mutation. The listener flits about between the field and the lab. The tone is warm in a way only the sun could make, the pace as forceful and as variable as a gale. Whether one locates Rock Island in a sea or in a refinished attic (as in Greg Burak’s album cover), whether one escapes to there or is banished, its psychic environs are charted clearly enough. Only at this remove from the mainland can we sense the conditions necessary for such a strange species of sound.
TOUR DATES:
11/1 – Ithaca, NY @ The Haunt *
11/2 – Annandale-On Hudson, NY @ SMOG *
11/4 – Baltimore, MD @ U+N Fest 6 *
11/5 – Richmond, VA @ Strange Matter *
11/7 – Greensboro, NC @ University of North Carolina – Greensboro *
11/8 – Asheville, NC @ The Mothlight *
11/9 – Birmingham, AL @ Syndicate Lounge *
11/10 – Baton Rouge, LA @ Spanish Moon *
11/11 – San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger *
11/12 – Austin, TX @ Sound on Sound Festival *
11/15 – Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere
11/16 – Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere
* w/ Girlpool
ABOUT PALM:
Palm plays rock music backwards. Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt’s guitars occupy themselves most often with the pace-keeping work typical of a rhythm section. Meanwhile, Gerasimos Livitsanos’ bass and Hugo Stanley’s drums perform commentary and reportage from their deeply embedded positions at the front. The band is firmly attached to the physicality of rock, but not as much its tone; their instruments tend to sound like any number of things at any given time.
None of the members of Palm are formally trained on their instruments. The band formed in 2011 at college in Upstate New York, when high school friends Eve and Kasra met Gerasimos and Hugo. In those early days, the band was just beginning to forge its collective musical identity through experiments in recording and performing live.
Their first album, Trading Basics (2015), was written in Hudson, NY, a riverside outpost where the group could clarify its intentions outside the direct influence of nearby cultural capitals. That year, the members of Palm relocated to Philadelphia, where they continue to live only a few blocks apart from one another. This proximity has facilitated a level of collaboration necessary for a sound so slippery to remain in the firm grasp of its players.
On 2017’s Shadow Expert EP, they made use of the steady hand granted by a tireless touring schedule, cutting their songs to efficiencies of pop confection without sacrificing the avant-adventurism at the center. The effort was met with praise from such outlets as Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin, and Tiny Mix Tapes, who likened the sound variously to Stereolab, Slint, Sonic Youth and Broadcast. With Rock Island (2018), Palm excuses the company of these myriad influences with a sly brush of a hand, ushering the listener into a new domain, thrillingly strange for all its familiarity.
PALM ROCK ISLAND CARPARK RECORDS FEBRUARY 9, 2018 PRE-ORDER:
CARPARK | ITUNES | SPOTIFY | APPLE
- Pearly
- Composite
- Dogmilk
- Forced Hand
- Theme From Rock Island
- Bread
- Color Code
- Swimmer
- Heavy Lifting
- 20664
- Didn’t What You Want (Happen)
Featured Photo Credit : Dylan Pearce
