PALM
words by preston ossman
"Palm is the best band." My friend Zach reiterates this statement every opportunity he can. On social media, in the comments section of online publications, and in person, this phrase is repeated. "Palm is the best band."
The assertion is pretty absurd. Some people payed $200 or more to see Guns ’n Roses last summer at the Brooklyn Bowl, while Palm has spent much of their young career playing moderately sized and attended DIY spaces up and down the east coast. If they aren’t selling out bowling alleys at $200 a head, what is the metric by which they can be said to be the "best"? More often, the "best band"argument is made for groups like the Beatles, who advanced studio technique and pop songwriting over the course of their career. Palm is merely in their nascency, with two Eps under their belt and another one on the way. The songwriting and production of all three releases is admittedly excellent, but how can they be determined as "the best band" without a full length LP to their name? Can 2
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six songs (ten if you have heard the unreleased cuts from their upcoming release) definitively dictate this degree of quality? Obviously, these questions are unanswerable if one aims to universalize "the best band" and apply this sentiment to everyone. If you don’t like rock music, have no sense of its history, and/or listen to Switchfoot regularly, Palm is probably not your cup of tea. Palm is not radio rock; Palm is anything but formulaic. The chords that Eve Alpert, Kasra Sarikhani, and Gerasimos Livitsanos exercise from their instruments allow for simultaneous harmony and dissonance. Backed by the jagged pulse of Hugo Stanley, who doubles as the drummer for Big Neck Police, Palm’s songs stab the knife deep into its listeners and twist, evoking the sublimity of a death rattle. Yet, there is nothing about Palm’s music which is not beautiful. Even at their noisiest, most abrasive moments Palm knows they are playing a song and making music, as opposed to aimlessly generating harsh sound ad nauseum. Even when a song is that its apex of aggression, the band has a tendency to pull the rug out from
under us, slowing down to half time, leaving space for a jazzy bass riff or a vocal melody that sounds like it should be coming from Serge Gainsbourg’s songwriting cannon. In this way, Palm embraces quality songwriting without compromising their art. They write pop songs, wrap them in barbed wire and tinsel and watch the listener tear away at this wrapping paper with pleasure. Many bands concern themselves with making music which is pleasing to the ear alone, harmonic and melodic, but shallow, while others focus on making their music impenetrable, abrasive, incoherent, but it ends up equally shallow. Palm not only sounds good, providing a pleasurable listening experience, but goes deep, both rhythmically and harmonically, rich with complexity and depth. Thus, it could conceivably be said that Palm is, to the ideal listener, the best band. Their music is pop art; it is punk, jazz, noise, and rock n’ roll, tied together like you have never heard before. All bias aside, give it a listen and find out that you agree with Zach, stuck on repeat, stating "Palm is the best band."