Shame on you, cherished reader, for thinking we’d review an album that’s already been out for half a year.
Though you aren’t wrong — Palehound‘s ‘Dry Food‘ was released last summer in North America and now, six months on, it gets its official UK release and a corollary eyeballing from us.
The band’s leash is held and led by one Boston-based Ellen Kempner, a 21-year-old with a yen for Elliot Smith and Liz Phair, lo-fi indie guitar hums and droll lyrics.
She first came about with 2013’s ‘Bent Nail‘ EP, written when she was still in college, smoking weed and watching cartoons.
It was an insecure and awkward introduction from a teenager full of, well, just those kind of callow anxieties that a gifted one like Kempner was able to knit together into a safety blanket of catchy hooks and melodies while the rest of us make do with a cathartic status update or two and wait for the ‘likes’ to roll in.
Her interviews last year touched upon a broken heart, loneliness and the ‘weird transition to adulthood’, enough woe to spur Kempner’s antsy mind-bobbles on for a debut album as promising as the EP.
Molly’s lively drums and bass, harassed by a turbulent guitar, are guilty of lulling the listener into thinking she has shorn her softer sonic sentiments in favour of a more rugged edge, one closer to Kings Of Leon back when they were good (remember those heady, hirsute days?).
But aside from the grit and rattle of ‘Cushioned Caging‘, the underlying tone befits an isolated listen with headphones rather than any social huddles. Kempner’s protean ability as an artist is bona fide.
Except for drums, she plays all the music on the record, all the capricious picks and plucks that sound as cohesive as they do loose. ‘Cinnamon‘, with its slippery lick, worthy of if not lifted from David Bowie‘s ‘Win‘, could easily be heard blaring out of Mac Demarco‘s trailer, while ‘Easy‘s snail-slow walk unlaces out to a kooky-flap ending.
Up for Freudian discussion is the sparest track on the record, ‘Dixie‘, where Kempner lays bear her bare dreams (“people I’ll never meet, showing up naked in my dreams”) and fleshy desires (“I try to close my eyes, but I really want to see their breasts like eyes are staring back at me”) over a solitary guitar.
There’s a prevailing tragicomic camber to Kempner’s words. “Drizzle honey on my open salt wound, Mom said use a harpoon if I ever need a meal”, on ‘Healthier Folk‘, and “You made beauty a monster to me, so I’m kissing all the ugly things I see”, on ‘Dry Food‘. The psyche-spoils are there to interpret on every song. And like anyone with a little hurt inside of them, on the sweet ‘Seekonk‘ the comfort of a family goes a long way.
‘Dry Food’s ration of just eight songs, only two more than ‘Bent Nail’, might at first feel like a skimpy lump of short-change being handed over. On closer inspection though, the change is nothing less than gleamy chunks of peeled, fragile nuggets that readily crumble any track-quota tiffs down to a bygone hill of beans.
Good things. Small packages. Of course.