Pedigree doesn't grow on trees: three members of new LA quartet Palms cut their teeth in the now-splintered Isis, with the fourth being none other than Deftones frontman Chino Moreno. Do I have your attention?
Palms doesn't necessarily toy with expectations, giving us more or less what we would anticipate from the pairing: lush, "mature" post-rock instrumentation overlaid with Moreno's lilting croon. It's not a jarring juxtaposition at all, Deftones often venturing close to this type of moody navelgazing themselves, and in light of that band's most recent release, Koi No Yokan, focusing more on gritty riffs and earworm grooves than atmosphere this new project gives Moreno a chance to work out his more contemplative voice.
At its most effective, the combination works beautifully: the opening two cuts, "Future Warrior" and "Patagonia", deftly weave shimmering guitar builds around Moreno's increasingly impassioned vocals, building into bookending crescendos that represent two of the rare genuinely "heavy" moments on the record.
The middle third ("Mission Sunset" and "Shortwave Radio") unfortunately sap the album of all forward momentum despite their good intentions. For one thing, you start to get the impression that Chino quickly shoehorned lyrics into pre-existing Isis demos, whereas the first couple of cuts came off as legitimate collaborations. Each song has a likable enough denouement, it just takes too long to get there.
"Tropics" finds the group in a strange horse latitude between shoegaze and what one could only call "yacht metal": a soothing, breezy juxtaposition of ambrosial guitars, plangent, semi-decipherable lyrics and crisp, nearly mechanical snare patterns.
It's strangely alluring, yet the very next track ("Antarctic Handshake") seeks to extend that formula to stultifying effect, nearly 10 minutes of adrift drone with Moreno filling in spacey, sometimes wordless vocals… it's a tepid finale to an album too mellow in its midsection to afford such a subdued sendoff.
And so Palms is hardly a failed effort, but as a cohesive whole it does seem to display the band padding out a brevity of material with substantial bloat in order to satisfy the demands of a traditional album running time. At the very least, though, it satisfies fan curiosity as to what exactly a continuation of Isis with Chino Moreno on vocals might sound like.
7/10
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZntL_JEyz4[/youtube]
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