Palms are deadly serious. Recent signees to Nicolas Vernhes' Rare Book Room imprint, the avant-pop duo's stock-in-trade is icy minimalism, a grave sparseness that sometimes borders on frightening. Their debut, the peculiarly titled It's Midnight In Honolulu, is Rare Book's second LP release, and it explores these dark tones through the lens of mostly German influences-- repetitive kosmische musik and Kompakt-style electronics, principally-- while looking to simultaneously appropriate vintage art rock of the early Velvet Underground.
These inspirations come into clearer focus when one considers the band's geography. Consisting of multi-instrumentalist/singer Ryan Schaefer and vocalist Nadja Korinth, Palms' only two members live with a literal ocean between them. Schaefer resides in New York and Korinth in Berlin. Not surprising, then, that some of New York and Germany's iconic underground acts-- here, Faust and Neu! share the same space with VU-- should provide the template for Palms' sound.
Palms at this point are probably too inexperienced to pursue a style with this kind of historical debt. Which might be why some portions of It's Midnight In Honolulu-- a promising record with several gratifying stretches-- come across as stilted and overthought. When Korinth shrieks atop "Monte Alban"'s pulsating minimal synths, it feels like the duo is aiming for difficulty rather than quality. The same goes for "Hang Your Head", one of a handful of rock-leaning numbers. With short bursts of Rid of Me-style aggression, the song also sacrifices its listenability to chase some sense of rawness or importance.
Ironically, though, it's "New Moon", Honolulu's warmest and loosest track, that provides the album's standout moment. A downright gorgeous song, it drifts like a vessel making its way out to sea, gliding and bobbing amidst a skittering arrangement that brings to mind Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project and standouts from Kompakt's Pop Ambient series. Korinth's vocals are at their most expressive here, sounding not unlike a female version of Sigur Rós' Jónsi Birgisson. Since Palms manage this tender, textural ambience with such ease, it's hard not to wonder why they chose not to explore it further.
The bulk of Honolulu's material is less divisive than the tracks outlined above, falling somewhere on the quality scale between the distant poles of "Monte Alban" and "New Moon". Stylistically, the remaining songs are split almost evenly between frosty electro-pop and sparse VU-style stompers, and Palms are usually able to yield positive results from both methods. The emotive "Das Lowenfell" is probably the best illustration of the former approach; the track utilizes military style drums, acoustic guitars, and synthetic flourishes as a canvas for Korinth to paint her gloomy half-German, half-English vocals. Also effective is "Boundary Waters", a spooky industrial number comprising rapid-fire beats and siren snatches that takes its cues from dark techno acts such as the Knife.
"End of Term" and "Leather Daddies", meanwhile, represent Honolulu's proto-punk section, and while these songs manage a capable (and often enjoyable) impression of 1960s skronk, it's nothing we haven't heard countless times before. And that's part of the reason Honolulu isn't as good as it could be-- the band seems more interested in modernizing classic records of the past instead of forging its own path. Their cold seriousness also treads much too closely to that ever-perilous point of becoming pretentious. Still, if Palms can manage to let their hair down a bit and locate their own voice, there's no reason this band can't go places.
