Spectreview: Bil Palmer – Welcome to Concrete

-LIGHT SLATE BLUE-

“I didn’t know then
the thing I still don’t know now”

Bil Palmer’s move from soggy overcast Seattle to comparatively less soggy and less overcast Portland has yet to wreak bright shining havoc on his music. Quietly released early in the year, his new collection of minimalist indie folk is also quietly brilliant. “Minimalist” may not actually be the right word: tracks like delicate opener “Who’s A” and the creaky, subdued “Scared to Move” burst at the seams with tiny aural touches that help coalesce the album into a piece, a old room in an old house with a penetrating frigidity. Welcome to Concrete sometimes reads as experimental, but it’s the good kind of experimental, the kind where clearly discernible solid song structures lend a purposefulness to the stretches of silence and musique concrète. It works so effectively that the only track recorded with more conventional band instruments, the loping “Three,” (the drums could have potentially been mixed better) briefly breaks the spell. But it is indeed a spell, and the presence of a spell altogether signals the inherent quality of an album that surely deserves more recognition.

Recommended for the chronically anxious (but it won’t make you feel better).