Fake Palms - Fake Palms

Pitchfork 69

There are no real palm trees in Toronto, but the city is seeing an uptick in tiki bars—the sort of bamboo-lined spaces with enough beach-scene murals and evergreen faux-fronds to make you think you’ve stepped into a Tahitian resort (at least after you’ve downed four flaming mai tais). But while scuzz-covered Toronto rockers Fake Palms hardly seem like the types to be strategically capitalizing on boutique cocktail trends, band founder Michael le Riche seems well familiar with the sensation of being caught between the world in which he exists and the one he wishes to inhabit.

Le Riche represents a bridge between divergent Toronto indie rock narratives. His former band, the Darcys, were signed to Broken Social Scene’s Arts & Crafts imprint, and, prior to a lineup shake-up last year that’s cast the group’s future in doubt, were being groomed as the label’s next-gen art-rock lynchpins. But with his new full-time concern, le Riche takes a detour down the burning-embered trail blazed by local art-punk heroes Metz to join the freak scene at Buzz Records, whose name is as reflective of the label’s rising profile as its raucous roster’s overheated amplifiers. And yet, even as Fake Palms has evolved from le Riche’s bedroom recording project to a veritable Toronto underground supergroup (with Lane Halley of Hooded Fang on second guitar, Burning Love’s Patrick Marshall on bass, and long-time Slim Twig associate Simone TB on drums), the band’s self-titled debut still bears an intensely claustrophobic quality. Le Riche isn’t so much stepping out into the spotlight as fortifying the walls around him, finding sanctuary in noise.

Fake Palms are, fundamentally, a dream-pop band that plays with garage-punk aggression, subjecting pristine pop songs to bruising beatings. For them, distortion isn’t a weapon, but the inevitable consequence of a stringent, Dogme 95-worthy approach to recording that emphasizes live-off-the-floor authenticity and forbids overdubs. The in-the-red interaction of le Riche and Halley’s gleaming guitar lines, Marshall’s rhythmic rumble, and Simone’s thwack attack has produced a naturally corroding effect, as if all the sound bouncing off the studio walls formed a storm system that soaked the recordings in static.

That shrouding effect can make it hard to grasp exactly what le Riche is trying to express, though the underpinning ennui is easy enough to parse. On the hard-charging opener "Fever Dream", the only easily decipherable words are "my friends"—repeated at the top of each increasingly inscrutable verse line—but they’re delivered with enough audible distress to suggest le Riche is ready to ditch them. The few other soundbites on the album that emerge from le Riche’s foggy cloud of a voice—"I’m not here/ I never was," "Where did my life go/ It’s on the ground," "I need a change"—suggest the singer is trying to retreat from the world even as his band is trying to thrust him to the frontlines.

This tug-of-war tension permeates the songs’ very structural DNA, constantly yielding surprising shifts: the deceptively upbeat twinkle of "Sun Drips" dissolves into a stalking, slow-motion krautrock strut; the wistful, melancholic verses of "Melatonin" are upended by a stomping, storming midsection powered by a twinned guitar line that sounds like broken glass—sparkling yet dangerously jagged. But if Fake Palms’ obfuscating approach threatens to pummel more outwardly melodic, mid-tempo turns like "Estate" into sluggish sludge, the pin-pricked riffs of disco-not-disco thumper "Sparkles" and "YTMATLDPH" poke holes for their fetching "ooh wee ooh" falsetto hooks to waft through, like steam rising out of the punctured cellophane film on a microwave TV dinner.

Though these songs date back to 2011, Fake Palms has the slight misfortune of emerging mere months after Viet Cong showed us how you can translate similar inputs—goth-schooled brooding, shoegaze haze, needling post-hardcore guitars—into something more expansive and emotionally direct. The structural intricacies and melodic integrity of this otherwise raw recording suggest le Riche is capable of pulling off something similarly bold. But for now, Fake Palms’ ocean-sized ambitions are confined to a grimy fish tank.