26-05-2016: palm - crank (detroit)

their music:
https://palmnewyork.bandcamp.com/

review:
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/05/26.html

vlog for the day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v19c6_lyp0M

yet another quick walk to phog and back to see another canadian band

i was planning on this show being an in and out on a holiday weekend in canada that you generally want to avoid cars, and really roads altogether, on. the ideal was to show up halfway through the local band's set in order to catch the math band....and maybe stay for the third set. instead, the math rock band played first and came on a little late, even by phog standards. i ended up catching the first two acts and skipping the third.

this was the second of three lengthy combinations; it happens to have been the least interesting of the three. you can hear plenty of evidence here that these are capable musicians that like to play acrobatic parts. so, why are they retreating into repetition for these long periods?

but, this is kind of a pointless critique, in some ways, too. i mean, there's more than enough going on, here. it's just that if you're accustomed to this hyper-adhd style of math rock, the reliance on repetition comes off as a crux. a faux pas, even.

but, i mean, listen for yourself and see what you think.

 

i wasn't really intending to stay for this set, but i decided i was feeling pretty relaxed and, hey, why not? the output surprised me quite a bit...

the impression i got from their bandcamp page was a kind of poppy post-punk, maybe with gazey leanings. i was expecting something fairly timid that i'd get bored of quite quickly. however, the actual show was fairly noisy and riff-oriented, and seemed to exist somewhere in that nice intersection of grunge and math rock that happened in the mid 90s. think polvo, for example. now, see, i suspect that they were playing mostly new material, or at least mostly material not accessible online, so there wasn't really any way to get a grasp of things ahead of time.

the drawback is that they seem to want to hold to a kind of traditional emo framework. in 2016, you only do this because you never really thought not to. it's just what you've always done, kind of thing. but, the genre is beyond dead, it's already been reincarnated as farce. there's nowhere to go with this. not even with kids, who are nowadays actually mostly going to interpret it as dad rock. they'll be better off if they can drop this. but, they'll probably have to redefine themselves to do it, and unknown bands tend not to survive such a thing.

but, the upshot is that they were legitimately tight and legitimately interesting. the bassist is unusually loud, given the genre, and it's a positive.

so, i guess the honest assessment is that while i wouldn't expect this precise configuration to go anywhere, this band may have the seeds of a successor project that is able to let go of the songwriting formulas they're accustomed to and expand a little more in that polvo-style direction.

dropping or muzzling the vocalist is going to be key in evolving the sound.

and here is the vlog for the day:

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2016/05/22.html