Silver Palm Silver Palm 10″
One of the lost projects of Portland’s early ’00s neo-No Wave boom, SILVER PALM included members of adherents like SLEETMUTE NIGHTMUTE and GLASS CANDY (among others) and essentially lived and died over the course of 2003, in the period of time before off-center art-racket fell out of favor in the city once everyone discovered Italo disco. The seven tracks on this 10″ were sourced from a small-run CD-R demo that I have to assume stayed fairly local, so it seems timely for them to be given a wider release now that Portland has regained its reputation for producing this stripe of weirdo disjointed post-punk in the last few years. “Present Creature” dishes out isolated single-note jabs of guitar that give way to a mischievous KLEENEX-by-way-of-LUNG LEG gang chant, as the tense austerity of “Saline Smear” (which pares the drums down to what sounds like only a snare for most of the song) and “Alibi” (with its seasick rhythm and knot of rapidly overlapping vocals) calls back directly to the No Wave principle of liberation through reduction/de(con)struction first laid down by the likes of MARS and UT. Some more uncovered marginalia in the girl-punk historical record, awaiting your exploration.