Surely up there for Musicians Most Likely To Actually Read This Entry…
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Alfred Soto: It begins with strings: melody as hard as silver, its sweep fluid as water. The lyrics aim for an aphoristic power shunned by most songwriters, but most songs aren’t as thought-through as Pallet’s, and most acts hire string arrangements to add histrionics to songs which deserve less. I don’t know if Pallett wrote the words to the accompaniment of the strings he heard in his head; the precision, lack of color, and uncluttered metaphors suggest pencils tracing on paper. He stands in a city he doesn’t know anymore because self-knowledge brings no happiness. Like his strings, his voice limns its emotional range and not a note more. This is neither restraint nor trepidation — it’s confidence.
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Mallory O’Donnell: On a path in which Arthur Russell and Leonard Cohen stare at each other from opposite mountains wondering why this facile moaner is trying to tether his kite to their legacy in order to effect an escape from the endless chasm of his own pretense.
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Edward Okulicz: Pallett’s a sought-after pro for strings with good reason. It feels like the ones here sway you in several different directions and moods at the same time — that “stand in the city” line feels like an anthem from the strings down, even if it’s immediately followed by a downer. It feels like an intriguing teaser of a story founded on some wonderful arrangements (rather than them being placed on top gratuitously), but the over-manneredness of his voice lets him down here and there, not because he’s not a good singer, but because lines like “my chest an empty cavity” are a hard sell even when you are. Yet it casts a spell that make me curious as to what comes next — that brief string sweep that opens the song closes it just as it’s briefly teased a third act.
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Brad Shoup: As you might expect, he can build a grander city from sounds than words. He starts with the collapse, but then depicts a scale skyline. When he abandons his plumminess for crystalline hoots — when he drops the bow — there’s some kind of wonder.
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Juana Giaimo: Pay attention to the details of “On a Path” with the slightly funny “(and/or son)” and how the line “I stand on a city that I don’t know anymore” changes in the second chorus, first to “I stand for a city that I don’t know anymore” and then to the ironic “clap hands for a city that we don’t know anymore”. As he includes us, we easily accept becoming the character he has chosen for us. His calm voice is the perfect narrator for our adventures, while his usual beautiful arrangements represent the tension and indifference that our character has, as well as the nostalgia for what we could have become.
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Jer Fairall: Chrissie Hynde’s “My City Was Gone” retold with chemical equations, Ursula Le Guin, paralyzed would-be supervillains and an ominous orchestral swirl in the place of the old shuffling bass groan. What it all adds up to, I’ll need the forthcoming In Conflict to properly determine, but for now, a captivating fragment.
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Megan Harrington: I really hear “Our Mutual Friend” — in the strings and in Pallett’s voice, but especially in the specificity and cadence of the lyrics here. “On a Path” doesn’t have the same sweep of modern romance, and Pallett relies more on repetition in place of narrative momentum, but the song’s opening and closing verses conjure the same 360° swoon I get listening to the Divine Comedy.
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Anthony Easton: I’m writing this on Ash Wednesday, and my hair still smells heavy with incense. My ears are filled with Tallis. I am thinking of regret and death. It’s March. It snowed yesterday. It’s still punishingly cold. The days are filled with thinking, reading, writing, revising and erasing. I don’t want to leave the house. I missed class on Monday and a seminar on Sunday. I will present something on trauma and silence tomorrow, at a conference in my department, a conference I don’t really want to go to. The weight of all of this is heavy on my shoulder, and it leads my body to collapse. There are highlights, certain silver filaments of joy, certain delights that sometimes are louder than the weather or the monastic practice. I return to a clutch of the same songs, hoping that magically the wind will die down and the snow will melt, the same magic and the same hoping that caused a dozen people to crowd my house for Shrove. The same magic that convinces me to get my forehead dirty. The one where I light a candle, the one that causes me to walk the city block, or say a list of names before bed. This will be added to that list.
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