Pallmer - Swimming
Self-Released
Released January 12th, 2024
“It takes just minutes to bulldoze right through what took years in the making”. Here begins Pallmer’s Swimming, pulling no punches with the very first line. Filled with heady metaphors, vulnerable confessions, and dark ruminations, the experimental chamber-pop duo spares no existential expense to deliver an album that is as devastating as it is delightful.
Swimming marks Pallmer’s first full-length album, and their first recording with avant-garde composer and producer Joshua Van Tassel, known equally for his experimental instrumental work as he is as producer and session percussionist. His signature sound is found in the Ondéa, a rare electronic instrument that can be provisionally described as an amalgamation of a theremin, cello, and analog synth. This remarkable instrument creates unique and complex textural layers that elevate Pallmer’s usual cello, viola, and synth instrumentation.
Never working in opposition but only serving to augment the other, vocalist Emily Kennedy’s mournful alto voice works above, almost entirely untethered to the stage of swirling strings and synths. While the vocal delivery tends to work within a succinct and consistent range, the instrumentation leaps and bounds across territory, swelling to cliff peaks then falling in torrential depths. It’s not music that is understood in any sort of mathematical or logical pattern - this music is understood only in the heart.
The title track stands out as one of the most powerful on the album. Equal parts wistful and hopeful, aquatic metaphors are used to describe the ways in which we all try to swim through life’s storms. The first section of the song flirts with escapism “craving sweetness like a fruit fly / wishing I could swim in it / saying I’m sad sounds too simple”. But the melancholy gives way to eventual resolution, with thick string swells lifting the track upward: “...uncertainty that could flood me / but I will keep my head up / knowing I could swim in it”.
Track 5, Soft Voice, is another powerful piece: one that seems to contemplate growth - or lack thereof - in relationships. Beginning a capella and slowly introducing a rhythmic string backdrop, Kennedy gently prods “there is a natural line / and we’re growing up against it / are we root bound?” The minimalist track lacks any superfluous ornamentation, instead providing space between more complex pieces to reflect. “A dandelion blooms through a crack in the pavement / just like you did too / though you won’t admit it”.
In context of their previous work, Swimming stands tall as their best release by far, a cohesive and compelling album that can’t help but transport the listener through memory, imagination, and back to the present, quiet moment.
- Penelope Stevens
