With the release of Tulips, Fredericton-based neoclassical duo Pallmer celebrate the arrival of spring and their forthcoming album.
Matt Carter
Time goes by so strangely now.
January melted into May.
Has it really been two years since the last time we welcomed new music from Pallmer?
Rolling out just in time for the peak of spring, Pallmer’s new single Tulips offers up a song for the season full of all the delicate beauty this duo are known to conjure.
Recorded and engineered by laudable composer and performer Joshua Van Tassel, who contributes additional textures to this track, Tulips marks the first release in which Pallmer’s Emily Kennedy and Mark Kleyn have opened their music up to outside collaboration, building upon the airy textures and layered complexities that have defined each new release spanning their five years of music making.
Tulips is the first song shared from Pallmer’s forthcoming album expected to arrive sometime later this year. Aided by Van Tassel’s incontestable ability to expand upon the tiniest audible details captured in the studio – almost as if he was collecting clues to solve some sort of auricular puzzle – Tulips highlights Kennedy’s dreamlike vocal delivery in ways we have not heard previously, placing each syllable on an upward trajectory to that doesn’t reach its climax until after the music has peaked; a successful experiment that bodes well for the coming album.
“Pallmer has one of the most unique musical voices in Atlantic Canada,” said Van Tassel. “We spent five days together in my studio exploring a palette consisting of almost entirely sounds and textures made from the cello and viola. The sessions were super creative, fast moving and really freeing. It also rained really hard a lot, and you can hear it all over the album.”
An observation on shifting seasons and a call to recognise nature’s annual return to form through budding plants, fresh smells, and pleasing colours slowly revealing themselves with each new day, Tulips is both a song for the season and hint at what the future holds for this incomparable duo.
Trouble won’t change the seasons.
The leaves will still unfurl.
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