The band Palm bring an impressive amount of music experimentation to the table, especially for a fairly young band. The compatriots, who met at Bard College upstate, but now reside in the independent music hotbed of Philadelphia, claim to be short on formal training, but I’m calling B.S. on that. Or rather, if their ability to produce intricate, jazz-inflected songs filled with unusual, shifting time signatures is something they just came up with on their own, then formal training may as well hang it up. On this packed weekend night at DIY-ish Palisades, the foursome came ready to wow us, playing only one song from their standout 2015 LP Trading Basics, released by Exploding In Sound. So we got the (relatively) hooky “Ankles” from that record, paired with a slew of relatively new or very-new songs, many of which the band themselves don’t have titles for. You could see that at points the members were feeling the songs out among each other, casting glances across the stage, but you wouldn’t have known it without looking at them; this material feels dialed-in and ready for primetime. What Palm are doing certainly has its cultural touchstones — some of the great “math rock” bands of mid-late-90s like Faraquet, Smart Went Crazy, June of 44 and Polvo — but it’s also daring and fresh at a time in “rock” music where the norm is more often party music that keeps a low bar. If the band’s subsequent releases have anything in common with what we heard tonight, or Trading Basics, then we’re going to be impressed by them for a very, very long time.
I recorded this set with Schoeps MK22 open cardiod microphones onstage together with a soundboard feed from Palisades FOH Ariel. The sound quality is outstanding. Enjoy!
Download the complete show: [MP3/FLAC]
Palm
2016-01-29
Palisades
Brooklyn, NY USA
Exclusive download hosted at nyctaper.com
Recorded by acidjack and nyctaper
Produced by acidjack
Schoeps MK22 (ORTF, stage lip)>NBob cables>PFA + Soundboard (engineer: Ariel Bitran)>Adobe Audition CS 5.5 (align, mix down, narrow onstage image)>Izotope Ozone 5 (effects)>Audacity 2.0.3 (track, amplify, downsample, dither)>FLAC ( level 8 )
Tracks
01 [new song 1]
02 I Don’t Want to know
03 Ankles
04 [new song 2]
05 Crank
06 [new song 3]
07 [new song 4]
08 Two Toes
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