Staff Reviews

Wild Palms - Until Spring

Review by Paul Stephen Gettings

An infuriatingly average affair with brief, merciful moments of complete awfulness.»

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comprised of charismatically roguish front man and one time teenage garage mc, lou hill, chatham resident and billy childish worshipping guitarist, darrel hawkins, demon drummer james parish and suitably elegant bass player gareth jones, the quartet - now quintet - coalesced out of a group of like-minded music fans in southgate, north london around 2007. first appearing as ex-lion tamers and feeding on a diet of beefheart, the fall, can, the bunnymen and wire they emerged in april 2008 as a ferocious, four-headed beast melding deconstructed guitar lines and parish's thundering rhythms to hill's staccato wordplay. key in the consideration of wild palms is their dramatic evolution and restless desire, collectively, to keep pushing forward. as the band moved away from their initial inspirations they began to sublimate the more obtuse angles of their nature within a warmer, more expansive soundscape. while they can still crackle with an underlying menace, 'until spring' finds something more amorphous about them, serene,
sublime even! in the space of a year the band have released sharp-shock debut 'over time', moving through the melancholic washes of the transitionary 'deep dive' (their first one little indian single) before arriving at this autumn's most fully realised sound in the form of the 'to the lighthouse' / 'draw in light' 10", a galvinising mix of stoicism and bliss. from widescreen opener 'draw in light' and 'pale fire's ghostly coda to the propulsive roar of 'carnations' and the gentle strings of 'lhc', 'until spring' is by turns heart stopping, heart broken, unsettling and uplifting. quite literally using the studio to supplement the shuddering dynamics of their live performance (the band utilised the biffa bins out back for percussion and even mic'd up the water tank), wild palms distilled all the ideas, sidesteps and progressions of the last two years into one glorious suite of songs.
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