When you hang with the same people long enough, you inevitably invent your own dialect with them. You also probably get sick of them occasionally. Palm’s Kasra Kurt, Eve Alpert, Hugo Stanley, and Gerasimos Livitsanos have a preternatural ability to get both of those ideas across at once with their rawboned art rock. Kurt and Alpert have been playing together since high school; in 2012, they formed Palm with Stanley and Kurt’s roommate Livitsanos at New York’s Bard College before relocating to Philadelphia. None of the quartet is trained in their respective instruments, so they developed their own messy syntax from scratch. Consequently, listening to Shadow Expert, their best work to date, is a lot like trying to understand people quarreling in a language you…
…don’t understand. Surely there is a fundamental logic, but it can be impossible to tell.
With that, Palm create the frenzied mental math of an obsessive, circular argument. Kurt’s and Alpert’s contrapuntal guitar phrases on “Walkie Talkie” and “Trying” are ceaseless repetitions of warring thoughts that count to infinity before tensions boil over into new wildly careening anxieties, never resolving anything along the way. Shadow Expert’s six tracks only last for 17 minutes because diagramming that kind of entropy is completely unsustainable. By “Sign to Signal,” the album’s last track, attrition takes over and a final instrumental attack gradually sputters. It’s disorienting and exhausting.
Inscrutable though they may be, Palm are not completely sui generis: They descend from a long line of experimental weirdos. Throughout Shadow Expert you can hear echoes of Slint’s Spiderland, the brash clangor of pre-SST Sonic Youth, the tricky time signatures of math rock demigods Battles, and the wonky iridescence of Deerhoof and tUnE-yArDs (the latter two have shared producer Eli Crews with Palm). But whether or not they have the chaotic compositions of these forbears in mind, Palm seem most interested in willfully straddling the line of communication breakdowns.
With a shoegaze ethos, Kurt and Alpert’s vocals are utilitarian, generally dedicated to how they are interacting rather than what they are saying. In an uncommon moment of intelligibility, Kurt, who sometimes sounds like Avey Tare, admits as much on “Walnut” when he slowly tuts “I’ve had enough of,” before enunciating every syllable: “speak-ing words so you might un-der-stand!” Palm Mad Lib-ed together the lyrics of “Walkie Talkie” from magazine clippings, and in the song’s spiky midsection, Alpert and Kurt alternate chirping words at each other, finishing each other’s thoughts via the imagined titular device. But after this flurry, a familiar phrase—the title of their previous record—emerges: “Trading basics with each other,” Kurt sings amid the band’s controlled detonations.
Trading Basics, with a few exceptions, was more subdued and straightforward than the serrated Shadow Expert, but the concept behind their debut’s name remains pertinent. At points, as on “Trying,” Stanley’s frenetic drumming perfectly mimics the panicked guitar stabs. At others, like “Two Toes,” Livitsanos’ thundering bass tries to restrain Kurt and Alpert’s guitars from jumping down one another’s throats before an unexpected moment of strummed unison. The band is constantly communicating in esoteric shorthand, often in several cross-talking conversations at once. What is basic to them is confounding to the listener, and they take that idea to a logical extreme.
In doing so, Palm offer a paradox about the precise chaos of Shadow Expert. They are navigating jagged angles, often introducing new tensions without resolving old ones, but their combined efforts create their own synchronicity. Conflict, in and of itself, becomes an act of solidarity.