Throwin’ Bo’s presents:
Palmyra
After the gig in Charlottesville finally ended, Mānoa Bell and Teddy Chipouras found their third band member, Sasha Landon, outside, sitting beside a shipping container and sobbing. The three new friends had formed Palmyra two years earlier, due in part to convenience and circumstance; they were the three people in a shared songwriting class at James Madison University who seemed to take making music—and making a life of it, too—most seriously. They’d moved in together during the pandemic, written and rehearsed most every morning, and played a few early shows online. As that fever broke, though, they fully committed, hitting the road as often and hard as possible and steadily earning homegrown attention along the East Coast.
The night’s sound in Charlottesville had been rough, sure, but the set had mostly been fine. In that moment, though, Landon became overwhelmed not only by the newly unmoored life of a hard-touring and magnetizing trio but also the cocktail of chemicals pinballing through their brain, the result of a recent bipolar diagnosis and early attempts to manage it. Bell and Chipouras sat there with Landon, offering whatever support they needed. This was neither the first nor last time for such resolve. There was that time Teddy wondered if this lifestyle was worth it while playing for 10 strangers who didn’t care at all in a Myrtle Beach wings dive, the time Sasha and Teddy rushed out from a Buffalo soundcheck to hold Mānoa in an alley after he learned his roommate had taken her own life back home. There are dozens of these stories—tales where three people learned how to be real and vulnerable with one another and, in turn, their audience, the tales that make Palmyra.
These moments of struggle, solidarity, and self-growth frame Restless, Palmyra’s debut album for Oh Boy Records and an unqualified ringer for anyone who loves the space where the roar of indie rock collides with raw folk music. Supported by a cadre of collaborators befriended on the road, Palmyra renders these songs about growing up and accepting oneself with alternating affability and aggression, these changing moods suited to changing circumstances and days. The tender yearning of “Buffalo,” written the day after that aforementioned phone call. The shout-out-loud catharsis of “Restless,” a mighty reckoning with extended adolescence. The sing-song sweetness of “Dishes,” a curious ode to domestic acceptance: This is a coming-of-age record for these uncanny times, every song another compelling document of reckoning with the places and shapes in which we’ve found ourselves.
During the last three years, Palmyra—for now, a trio with upright bass, electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin or the mandocello, and lots of banjo—have cut a series of EPs and singles, often on the cheap and on the fly. When they realized the time had come to concentrate on a proper album, they recognized that they had a good problem: There were simply too many songs. Bell, Chipouras, and Landon are, after all, all songwriters, and Palmyra’s tunes take shape when one member brings a draft to the rest of the band to finish.
So at a house on a Virginia lake, they played nearly all of their stuff for Jake Cochran, a drummer and confidant they had tapped to help produce their debut. Cochran would play along, not only adding drums to these songs (often for the first time) but offering his suggestions as a listener. They picked the material by instinct: What felt most poignant and powerful in the moment, especially when pushed beyond the bounds of a trio?
That instinctual feeling radiates through Restless, which manages to feel both produced and primal, as if you’ve wandered into the studio to find Palmyra breathlessly barreling through the best of its catalogue. The centerpiece is “Shape I’m In,” a mind map Landon wrote as they began to navigate their bipolar diagnosis. Every verse includes a new apology—their face, their demeanor, their tone, Landon is sorry about it all. But as the song builds to a climax fit for vintage Bright Eyes, it becomes clear that it is also Landon’s call for acceptance, to be taken not as an error but simply as they are. It is a song of oneself, a proclamation meant to be yelled through gritted teeth.
Played for the first time alongside the Virginia lake, “No Receipt” is an incisive contemplation of our passing days and of the way worrying about our perceived faults keeps us from self-fulfillment. It is impossible not to catch a glimpse of yourself here, whether you’re the one forever running out of money or squandering your time staring into the yawning void of a cell phone. Maybe you’ll see yourself in the nervy and sharp “Palm Readers,” too, where mixed moments of feeling lonely or overwhelmed, self-deprecating or overconfident offer an honest topography of emotional existence. Above a rippling organ line, “Arizona” is a country-soul wonder about days of discovery and preemptive nostalgia for what we’ve encountered but left behind in the perpetual quest to get somewhere else.
And then there’s the closer, “Carolina Wren,” the last song to be written for Restless and mostly presented here in its demo form from the lake house. Penned by Landon in a moment of “feeling OK after a long period of not feeling OK,” it is an exquisite hymn to the prospect of being forever new while holding onto the people and things that have given us value and meaning. Restless is so often a record about coming of age; “Carolina Wren” is a beautiful glimpse into what it’s like to get there, at least for a moment.
Palmyra straddles at least two musical worlds. They are, on one hand, a band from the South that plays traditional instruments and indeed once lived in the old-time locus of Floyd, Virginia. Comparisons to and a kinship with The Avett Brothers and even Old Crow Medicine Show are inevitable. On the other hand, Palmyra writes about suicide, gender dysphoria and identity, and an epidemic of financial survival in songs that flirt with soul, post-rock, and even emo; the South, too, is the place of My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, Cat Power, and, now, Palmyra.
Where they fall on this divide doesn’t really matter. The 10 tracks of Restless are compulsive and immediate, true-to-life testimonials from three very good songwriters figuring out existence in real-time in verse. These are songs to be sung or shouted out loud, to be coveted as anthems as we try to make our own way from whatever shape we’re in toward whatever shape we hope to become.
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DOORS at 7:00PM | MUSIC at 8:00 PM
