Wild Palms – Until Spring

Album Review by Sam Wiseman | 24 Feb 2011
Album title: Until Spring
Artist: Wild Palms
Label: One Little Indian
Release date: 7 Mar

Although we are assured that London's Wild Palms subsisted on “a diet of Beefheart, The Fall, Can, and Wire” while working on the songs that comprise their debut Until Spring, you wouldn't know it from the music, which instead follows the rather tired blueprint of overwrought, anthemic indie rock established in recent years by the likes of The Killers.

Song titles name checking modern literary classics – Pale Fire and To the Lighthouse – evince Wild Palms' pretensions to lyrical profundity, and while it's hard to imagine Nabokov coming out with imagery like “a human torch, a phosphorescent heart”, there is at least a sense of earnestness and ambition in singer Lou Hill's songwriting, one that dovetails well with the record's ever-present epic, soaring guitars. Until Spring provides a diverting enough listen if you're a fan of emotive, reverb-drenched alt rock; just don't expect Woolf-inspired krautrock. [Sam Wiseman]

Playing King Tut's, Glasgow on 4 Mar

http://www.wearewildpalms.com