Palm breaks all the rules

The north Philly four-piece strikes a balance between pleasing and disturbing with ‘Shadow Expert’

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Photo credit: Courtesy Palm
SHADOW EXPERTS: Palm is Gerasimos Livitsanos (clockwise from left), Hugo Stanley, Kasra Kurt and Eve Alpert.


Hailing from North Philadelphia, math rock outfit Palm is living proof that you don’t always need to know the rules in order to break them. The Bard College-born four-piece featuring Eva Alpert (guitar/vocals), Kasra Kurt (guitar/vocals), Gerasimos Livitsanos (bass) and Hugo Stanley (drums) have no formal training in their respective instruments. Yet Palm continues to churn out complex, polyrhythmic songs driven by dissonant guitars, unorthodox tunings and jagged melodies.

“I do think that because there were no rules I kind of just did whatever I wanted with the guitar,” Alpert says. “If I couldn’t make a chord sound good, I’d just change the tunings of the strings until a chord sounded cool.”

Early Palm performances were built around just a handful of songs, as the band settled into the obscure tunings necessary for its members’ self-taught playing. This allowed each of them to experiment with irregular time signatures and cacophonous harmonies. “Sometimes if you’re well-trained musically, it’s hard to unlearn,” Alpert says. “And sometimes it’s cool to not know, to break rules. Sometimes it’s hard if you’re trained in an instrument.”

Shadow Expert (released in June via Carpark) is a far cry from Palm’s early recordings, which have nearly been erased from their physical and online presence. Two EPs, Into the Bulk and Ode to Scott (2014), play up math rock’s grating ambiguity with intricate tracks that meander without a sense of direction. “We felt like a really different band with those recordings,” Alpert says. “It’s just refreshing to remove stuff that’s old, for us at least. While it was obviously formative, that doesn’t make it good.”

While the band’s energies feel scattered on its debut, Shadow Expert hones in on more accessible components. “I think we wanted to make more concise songs, like shorter and more to the point,” Alpert says. “And something also that was more harmonically pleasing, but also rhythmically disturbing.”

This newfound focus shows through on tracks such as “Two Toes,” in which the bridge reaches a jarring point of rhythmic unison, coupled with a rare instance of lyrical clarity as Kurt and Alpert sing, “How could I forgive that?/How could I forget that?” Calmer moments such as these allow listeners to digest the group’s typically frenzied, improvised-sounding project.

The follow-up to 2015’s Trading Basics sustains Palm’s signature math rock-centered ventures while incorporating fewer conventional details. “We’re just interested in those tropes that electronic music has like a record skipping, or a drop or looping elements,” Alpert says.

Shadow Expert is rife with electronically-inspired ingredients, such as the looping guitar riffs on “Trying,” or the grating intro of “Sign to Signal,” which emulates a skipping record skipping via Stanley’s repetitive percussion.

Taking over a year and a half to release after its completion, Shadow Expert already feels stale to Palm, a group with admittedly short attention spans. The band continues to indulge in new inspirations as its members grow their sound, calling on repetitive electronic tropes that seem to break their own rules of unpredictability.

With Mothers, Palberta, Pallas, Art School Jocks, Shepherds, Trashcan. $20-$25. 8 p.m. Sat., July 22. The Earl. 488 Flat Shoals Ave. S.E. 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com.