SATURDAY FEB 10, 2018
529 Presents:
529 & Irrelevant Music Present:
Palm
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE | Red Sea | + Organized Boys DJs
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 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."
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE
Ever since SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE released their self-titled debut in 2014, they’ve developed a reputation for being your favorite band’s favorite band. Theirs is the music of immersion, of confrontation, the kind that makes a listener stop and wonder, “How are they even doing that?” And as the years wear on, that sense of bafflement has made room for SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE to quietly but steadily ascend, with their most recent album, 2018’s Hypnic Jerks, leaving them poised on the precipice of wider recognition.
On April 9th, 2021 SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE released their fourth album and Saddle Creek debut, ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH. The album signals new chapters for the band on multiple fronts, being the first to feature their new three-piece lineup, as well as the first to be entirely self-recorded and produced. Guitarist/vocalist Zack Schwartz and bassist/vocalist Rivka Ravede are now joined by new member Corey Wichlin, a multi-instrumentalist who relocated from Chicago to the band’s home territory of Philadelphia last year. In the spring of 2020, the trio began to write their new album at a distance by emailing files back and forth. “The process of making this album was basically the exact opposite of our experience creating Hypnic Jerks,” Schwartz explains. “We had to record that in seven days, because that was the studio time we had, whereas ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH was made over the course of three, four months.”
An abundance of time wasn’t the only difference. Recording remotely offered the band an incentive to experiment with new possibilities for their sound, resulting in an album that is unlike any SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE has released before. Once the band finished recording and mixing the album digitally, they mastered it to tape, lending the collection a textured, dimensional quality. “We knew we wanted to use some new instrumental elements on this album,” Wichlin says. “We’re not going fully electronic,” Schwartz adds, “But guitar, bass, drums just get kind of monotonous.”
ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH opens with a sonic squall, an abstract composition that transitions into the brisk highway meditation “ENTERTAINMENT.” As a listening experience, the album is a persistent exercise in the bait-and-switch, in what the band describes as a conscious effort to draw the listener deeper into their mystifying manufactured landscape. Take “GIVE UP YOUR LIFE,” a sprawling track that drops two semitones from beginning to end, a cheeky mastering decision that would fool anyone trying to play along. “There are some bizarre tunings on this album,” Schwartz says while reflecting on the process that wrought the single “IT MIGHT TAKE SOME TIME.” “That one started out as a pretty normal rock song, but then we heavily fucked with it to make it feel more discordant.” “Now it sounds like drowning,” Ravede adds.
Though ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH doesn’t cohere in a single, unifying theme, the band samples old obscure commercials throughout, many of which guided the process of writing a song instead of serving as an appendage. Schwartz describes his songwriting process as a stream-of-consciousness, while Ravede asserts that she doesn’t typically write vocal parts with any specific intention in mind. “When I write, the narrative usually doesn’t present itself until after the song is done. And even then, it depends on how the listener interprets the words,” she reflects. Regardless of how dreamlike SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s lyrics can be, reality rears its head throughout ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH. “THE SERVER IS IMMERSED” is perhaps the poppiest song on the album, but it borrows inspiration from Schwartz’s day job working in the food service industry. Lyrically, it tracks the monotony of the day-to-day, inducing hypnosis until all three band members begin to sing, snapping the listener out of the spell.
If there’s a song on ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH that best encapsulates what SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is all about, it’s “THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN’T DO,” a track that illuminates the growth that this band has undergone since their foundation to now. The song wrestles between the sublime and the monstrous as Ravede’s feather-light vocals are overtaken by Schwartz’s strained howl, underscored by shattering live drums that recall the band’s scrappy origins. “This song draws on some of the sonic aesthetic of SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s old records and aligns those sounds with the electronic instrumentation we’ve been exploring,” Wichlin says. ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH isn’t a metamorphosis, it’s simply the newest iteration of a longstanding project. “There’s a line in the Bee Gees documentary that I think applies to us. I’ll paraphrase: ‘We may not have always connected, but we always stuck around,’” Ravede says. Schwartz jumps in, “SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE: we’re still here.”
Ever since SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE released their self-titled debut in 2014, they’ve developed a reputation for being your favorite band’s favorite band. Theirs is the music of immersion, of confrontation, the kind that makes a listener stop and wonder, “How are they even doing that?” And as the years wear on, that sense of bafflement has made room for SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE to quietly but steadily ascend, with their most recent album, 2018’s Hypnic Jerks, leaving them poised on the precipice of wider recognition.
On April 9th, 2021 SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE released their fourth album and Saddle Creek debut, ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH. The album signals new chapters for the band on multiple fronts, being the first to feature their new three-piece lineup, as well as the first to be entirely self-recorded and produced. Guitarist/vocalist Zack Schwartz and bassist/vocalist Rivka Ravede are now joined by new member Corey Wichlin, a multi-instrumentalist who relocated from Chicago to the band’s home territory of Philadelphia last year. In the spring of 2020, the trio began to write their new album at a distance by emailing files back and forth. “The process of making this album was basically the exact opposite of our experience creating Hypnic Jerks,” Schwartz explains. “We had to record that in seven days, because that was the studio time we had, whereas ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH was made over the course of three, four months.”
An abundance of time wasn’t the only difference. Recording remotely offered the band an incentive to experiment with new possibilities for their sound, resulting in an album that is unlike any SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE has released before. Once the band finished recording and mixing the album digitally, they mastered it to tape, lending the collection a textured, dimensional quality. “We knew we wanted to use some new instrumental elements on this album,” Wichlin says. “We’re not going fully electronic,” Schwartz adds, “But guitar, bass, drums just get kind of monotonous.”
ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH opens with a sonic squall, an abstract composition that transitions into the brisk highway meditation “ENTERTAINMENT.” As a listening experience, the album is a persistent exercise in the bait-and-switch, in what the band describes as a conscious effort to draw the listener deeper into their mystifying manufactured landscape. Take “GIVE UP YOUR LIFE,” a sprawling track that drops two semitones from beginning to end, a cheeky mastering decision that would fool anyone trying to play along. “There are some bizarre tunings on this album,” Schwartz says while reflecting on the process that wrought the single “IT MIGHT TAKE SOME TIME.” “That one started out as a pretty normal rock song, but then we heavily fucked with it to make it feel more discordant.” “Now it sounds like drowning,” Ravede adds.
Though ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH doesn’t cohere in a single, unifying theme, the band samples old obscure commercials throughout, many of which guided the process of writing a song instead of serving as an appendage. Schwartz describes his songwriting process as a stream-of-consciousness, while Ravede asserts that she doesn’t typically write vocal parts with any specific intention in mind. “When I write, the narrative usually doesn’t present itself until after the song is done. And even then, it depends on how the listener interprets the words,” she reflects. Regardless of how dreamlike SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s lyrics can be, reality rears its head throughout ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH. “THE SERVER IS IMMERSED” is perhaps the poppiest song on the album, but it borrows inspiration from Schwartz’s day job working in the food service industry. Lyrically, it tracks the monotony of the day-to-day, inducing hypnosis until all three band members begin to sing, snapping the listener out of the spell.
If there’s a song on ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH that best encapsulates what SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is all about, it’s “THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN’T DO,” a track that illuminates the growth that this band has undergone since their foundation to now. The song wrestles between the sublime and the monstrous as Ravede’s feather-light vocals are overtaken by Schwartz’s strained howl, underscored by shattering live drums that recall the band’s scrappy origins. “This song draws on some of the sonic aesthetic of SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s old records and aligns those sounds with the electronic instrumentation we’ve been exploring,” Wichlin says. ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH isn’t a metamorphosis, it’s simply the newest iteration of a longstanding project. “There’s a line in the Bee Gees documentary that I think applies to us. I’ll paraphrase: ‘We may not have always connected, but we always stuck around,’” Ravede says. Schwartz jumps in, “SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE: we’re still here.”
Red Sea
"Red Sea is a great name for a band that splits the difference between jittery noise punk and artsy indie rock. I like to imagine the four band members striding through dry sand littered with seashells, wailing on their instruments as enormous walls of waves loom on either side. Biblical allusions aside, the Atlanta band have been dealing in duality lately. Last year they put out the EP Yardstick For Human Intelligence and the full-length In The Salon as Bandcamp releases, but both are getting re-released this year by Bayonet, the label run by Beach Fossils frontman Dustin Payseur and his wife Katie Garcia. After a few singles from the album, “Vacant Ring” is the first off the EP, and it’s a looming, tense number that barrels through frenetic guitar-work to a surprisingly cathartic burst of bright vocal loops at the end." -Caitlin White, Stereogum
"Red Sea is a great name for a band that splits the difference between jittery noise punk and artsy indie rock. I like to imagine the four band members striding through dry sand littered with seashells, wailing on their instruments as enormous walls of waves loom on either side. Biblical allusions aside, the Atlanta band have been dealing in duality lately. Last year they put out the EP Yardstick For Human Intelligence and the full-length In The Salon as Bandcamp releases, but both are getting re-released this year by Bayonet, the label run by Beach Fossils frontman Dustin Payseur and his wife Katie Garcia. After a few singles from the album, “Vacant Ring” is the first off the EP, and it’s a looming, tense number that barrels through frenetic guitar-work to a surprisingly cathartic burst of bright vocal loops at the end." -Caitlin White, Stereogum