Tag: Palberta

Palberta Play With Fiction, Animals, and Repetition on Poppy New LP Palberta5000

Photo Credit: Chloe Carrasco

Nina Ryser, Ani Ivry-Block and Lily Konigsberg don’t take themselves too seriously, and that’s what makes their band, Palberta, so much fun to listen to. The NYC-based indie rock outfit’s fifth studio album Palberta5000, like much of their previous work, is disjointed, chaotic, and sometimes disorienting – in the best way possible.

The album features the kind of lo-fi sound you’d imagine emanating from a Brooklyn warehouse show, with songs inspired by the relationship between the members, both as bandmates and as friends. The song “Before I Got Here,” for instance, mimics an argument between two people, then settles into soothing instrumentals, conveying that “you made it, you communicated, and now you’re still friends,” Konigsberg explains.

“We’re three women, and groups of three are really hard,” she says. “We had to figure out how to spend a lot of time together on the road and make music together without talking over each other or anyone feeling left out, and we have grown a lot in accepting and working through our issues. I feel like that made the music clearer because we can write together more easily.”

In a larger sense, the album deals with connection and community, something that’s become elusive to many in recent times. In “Corner Store,” they sing in discordant vocal tracks about meeting up with your friends at a local bodega, adding a fictional storyline about seeing someone they know on the cover of the newspaper.

The line between reality and nonsense is blurred throughout the album, where the band used animals as plot devices just for the fun of it. On “Cow,” they build a story around the act of taking home a bovine buddy, and in “Red Antz,” they describe running over the insects on a drive. “We’re oftentimes singing about feelings that are there, but maybe fictional scenarios that kind of bring about those feelings that maybe someone could relate to,” says Ivry-Block.

“We use absurdist combinations of words, and then they come to take on meaning when we put them together and process them,” Konigsberg adds. “There was really no reason to include so many animals. It was a surprise to all of us.”

Palberta’s songs are notoriously short — the 22 tracks on their last album, 2018’s Roach Going Down, are all under three minutes — and with this album, they set out to make them longer. “People always gave us grief about how short our songs are, and said it would be cool if we could go for longer, and I wanted to see if that was true,” says Ivry-Block. They succeeded: Two of the songs, the heavy, staccato “Fragile Place” and the harmony-driven “All Over My Face,” are nearly five minutes.

To lengthen the songs, the band experimented with repeating lyrics and melodies. “We write parts that sound kind of crazy, but if they’re repetitive, they’re less so,” says Ivry-Block. “If you hear it more than once, it becomes normal.” For the entire second half of “Big Bad Want,” for instance, the phrase “yeah, I can’t pretend what I want” repeats again and again in a way that’s a bit maddening yet pleasantly hypnotic.

Palberta5000 was also more heavily produced than the band’s past albums, giving it a poppier sound, which they were already inclined to incorporate. “We were all just way more interested in pop music at that current moment,” says Konigsberg. “Listening to it, being better at our instruments, being in a professional recording studio, and having a better vocal mic sound all led to a more poppy album.”

Palberta has been around for seven and a half years, the members having first met while they were students at Bard College. The origin of the band’s name, like much of its music, is fairly random: they’re all fans of their dads, so they were going through their dads’ names, and a friend of Konigsberg’s who was staying with her had a dad named Albert. They decided to feminize it and added the “p” as a play on words signifying their friendship. “People think we’re from Canada,” says Konigsberg, even though the existence of the Canadian province didn’t even register in their minds at the time.

Ivry-Block hopes that when people listen to Palberta, they feel inspired to make music also. “We all come from really different musical backgrounds, and we kind of came together to make very specific music,” she says. “I just believe in my heart [that] anyone is capable of making music, and we’ve just got to go for it. We hope it inspires everyone, even if you don’t have any experience. You can do it.”

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LIVE REVIEW: Told Slant, Lily Konigsberg @ Park Church Co-op

As someone who’s spent little time in them, it is strange how familiar old churches smell. They smell like warm dust, wood, and maple syrup—like a childhood home you’ve never stepped foot in before. It’s a combination of aromas rarely found in the glass and concrete structures of New York City, but at Park Church Co-Op in Greenpoint, it is a scent that lingers low in the air and welcomes you in. On Monday night, the Co-op was glowing electric pink and blue, casting an artificial sunset against the furthest stage wall. Its edges bled to purple where the two colors met. A slight, boyish woman by the name of Franz Charcoal took the stage holding a mint green electric guitar. Franz played simple, minute-long songs that sometimes ended just when you were getting into them. At times these songs were so short, the audience would hesitate to clap at the end, thinking Franz was simply pausing before another verse. She never was. “Yeah, they’re pretty short,” Franz said after one such moment. “But there’s a lot of them.”

Despite the dimly lit stage, I couldn’t help but think that this Franz Charcoal person looked and sounded familiar. A bit like Greta Kline of Frankie Cosmos. A lot like Greta Kline of Frankie Cosmos, in fact. But if you were to ask the woman herself, she was Franz Charcoal, a “rascal” who plays brief, autobiographical songs about misbehaving in church, of all places. Her presence was playful and lightweight considering the heavy atmosphere of the church itself. When Franz left the stage, the crucifix hanging behind her was bathed in hot red spotlights like a scene from a religious horror film.

The following acts helped a great deal in bringing some levity back to the setting. Felicia Douglass (of Ava Luna) offered her crisp approach to electronic, soul, and poetic R&B, which at times sounded like the seeds of Prince songs. Palberta’s Lily Konigsberg, meanwhile, made great use of her comedic timing to compensate for the fact that she’d lost her voice the night before. “This is a 50-year-old smoker’s rendition of my songs,” she said. “I may cough. I don’t want to.” Her music retained its stark beauty despite being stripped of some of the synthesizer flourishes on her recordings, and the rasp in her voice was a welcomed bit of grit to an evening filled with such polite music. Alone with an acoustic guitar, Konigsberg still yields a lovely and entertaining performance, especially when punctuated by the artist spritzing her throat with mentholated cold medication. At the end of her set, she curtly and sweetly said, “Okay. I’m done.”

Told Slant’s Felix Walworth is the first performer to address the oddness of the church all evening. At one point he paused just before starting a song; “Sorry,” he said. “It’s actually profoundly strange to be up here.” And it was profoundly strange to be down in the pews, as well. Not only for their unavoidable religious context, but also because sitting in a church pew makes you feel like a child. When Walworth (politely) ordered the crowd to stand up and sing “Tsunami” with him, I felt like I was participating in a camp sing-along or a Sunday sermon. Sometimes the connotations of the space you occupy are too powerful to leave the performance alone, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it was, as Walworth pointed out, profoundly strange.

TRACK PREMIERE: Lily and Horn Horse “Next To Me”

 

Lily Konigsberg is one third of Palberta, a confusing, experimental, instrument-swapping trio based in upstate New York. Matt Norman creates intricate, instrumental compositions under the moniker Horn Horse. Fate brought them together when Matt went to his former residence in search of a lost blanket only to find Lily, its new tenant and fellow Bard graduate. The rest, as they say, is history. The two soon became collaborators and together, they make up both parts of Lily and Horn Horse, combining their strengths to make a welcomingly different type of pop music.

The duo recently signed to Ramp Local to release their debut LP, Next To Me, due in late September. The title track is a quick but satisfying single which, according to the two musicians, is “about schooling an oblivious suitor, and becoming aware of infinite love.” Lily’s voice is soft and light as she repeats several lines, almost like a mantra put to melody: “Do you see what I see? / Listen to me beforehand, baby / If you want to get next to me.”

Though undeniably a dance track, Matt’s compositional flair shines through in cinematic flourishes and jazzy, stuttering synths that at one point melt convincingly into the sound of traffic. The vocal lines are catchy but unexpected, and pair well with the many rhythmic layers. It’s pop music with a playful quirkiness, so their supporting spot on Deerhoof’s fall tour makes perfect sense. Catch both bands together in Brooklyn at Villain on 10/7, and stream the single “Next To Me” below.

https://soundcloud.com/ramplocalrecords/lily-and-horn-horse-next-to-me/s-U6E6g

LIVE REVIEW: Palberta @ Palisades

palberta

When the drummer of Palberta sat behind the kit and stared at the set with incredibly exaggerated concentration, she almost gave off the impression that she didn’t really know how to play. Every beat looked like a painstakingly calculated move, one you might see in a beginning musician who requires complete focus to practice their scales or rudiments.

But this is Palberta, and they definitely know how to play. In fact, the members of the trio, Lily, Ani, and Nina, all took a turn behind the drumset during their August 14th set at Palisades, and all played the bass and guitar. They’re skilled enough that they don’t have to prove they have any skills, and can pretend they don’t know what they’re doing because they know exactly what they’re doing. So, they’ve disregarded most traditional structures, rhythms and melodies. They’re beyond giving a fuck.

Their songs may be short, and may include a section where the guitarist fake-cries into the mic, whining intelligibly while the others mouth along. Songs might borrow from the kid’s chant “One, two three, four/ I declare a thumb war,” or devolve into the creepiest nursery rhyme you’ve ever heard. Their movements and gestures seem choreographed down to their facial expressions, and are just as important as their music is; some interpretive-dance-like moves elicited cheers from fans, and during the end of the set, each member smiled sweetly at the crowd, grimaced maniacally, or remained stonefaced. By the end of the song they were playing, the audience broke out in shocked laughter as fake blood began slowly dripping from musicians’ mouths.

Their lyrics range from short, vaguely political phrases (“Hey dude, c’mon/ You don’t even know where the pharmacy is”) to barely intelligible. But even with the unexpected nature of their performance, and their frequent instrument swaps, there’s a some kind of consistency to their sound: some kind of quirky, improvisational punk.

At various times during Palberta’s show, I was convinced that the whole performance was  joke, that I wasn’t cool enough to get the actual joke, that they were completely serious and then finally, that maybe this was the point of their music: Do these things really even matter? If you like what you hear, not really. Palberta isn’t for everyone, but maybe that’s because some of us are trying to hard to understand them.

https://soundcloud.com/osrtapes/palberta-my-plan