Like many observers, ANBAD has long noted the shift towards ever-complex pop music from solo artists.
Being a soloist takes the desire to produce intricate music, then magnifies and massages it to tesseract-proportions of delicacy and contortionism.
Not having a drummer constantly on your case about the lack of room in the song for a tom-tom fill allows ideas to ferment beyond usual parameters, I suppose.
New Palace Talkies, despite the pluralised name, is a solo project, that, excitingly, expands to an eight-piece when the live brass section performs.
Yep. Live brass. You’re interested now, right?
Indeed, what’s overwhlemingly intriguing about Who Can Say is the prospect of a live brass-propelled version. But while we’re stuck listening through our headphones we can enjoy a song that revels in its own complications.
Beats skitter – finally, a legitimate use of that particular cliché – and the song’s melody really explores the room.
Yes, the above undersells the song mightily. It is hard to describe music that is often ludicrously self-indulgent in any other way. But New Palace Talkies is a man wrestling with his dual sensibilities: the need to make coiling and complex sounds, and the understanding that it has to have, you know, a tune and palatability.
He nails it. As the song dissolves and bobs skyward near the end, every noodling is suddenly justified.