Wild Palms
Audio
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1. Pale Fire
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2. To The Lighthouse
Biography
"We just used it as a name to book a practice under," recalls Hill, "then someone started giving us gigs and people started talking about it and writing about it, and it was like, Woah woah woah! We just used that name as a laugh."
Ignoring advice to stick with it, the band remerged as Wild Palms. More importantly though, as they moved away from their initial inspirations they began to sublimate the more obtuse angles of their nature within a warmer, more expansive soundscape. While it still crackled with an underlying menace, there was something more amorphous about them, serene, sublime even, that couldn't be forced into any handy, hyphenated pigeonholes. Hill's vocals were more soulful and ambiguous in their content while Hawkins' disjointed virtuosity was now serving something bigger and more nuanced.
"We never really talked about it," notes Hawkins, "but for me, the flat I lived in was horrible, I was working in care, that's not exactly pretty, the studio wasn't pretty, the touring wasn't pretty - so I wanted to make something beautiful that would surpass everything around me, that was bigger than myself."
For the group, the building of their own recording/rehearsal space in North London was integral to their development, giving them the space to play, experiment and grow free from any external pressure.
"All this new stuff was coming out and we never knew what to grip onto, we were just playing," remembers Hill, "then all of a sudden everything just started working. Something that was clearly ours starting coming and it felt like we had ownership over it."
With the first fruits of their new set up, Deep Dive available in Spring 2010, Wild Palms locked themselves away over June and July with Grizzly Bear/ Depeche Mode/ These New Puritans producer Gareth Jones (no relation to WP bassist!) to work on the debut album.
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’ed up the water tank), Wild Palms distilled all the ideas, sidesteps and progressions of the last two years into one glorious suite of songs.
From widescreen opener Draw In Light and Pale Fire's ghostly coda to the propulsive roar of Carnations and recent single To The Lighthouse via the gentle strings and allusions to Greek mythology of LHC, Until Spring is by turns heart stopping, heart broken, unsettling and uplifting: A snapshot of band fully realizing the potential of their creativity and their almost telepathic intuition as players.
Still finding it impossible to rest on the laurels, even for a second, the group have already moved on, recruited a new member, guitarist/ multi-instrumentalist Bobby Krilic and are making plans for a follow up, with recent live shows peppered with a handful of newly penned tracks.
"I listened to the album for the first time the other day and I really enjoyed it," says Hill in a rare moment of retrospection. “You know what? We should give ourselves a fucking pat on the back for that, it's a well good effort."
