Date Palms – Honey Devash (Mexican Summer Records)
With their sophomore release, California duo Date Palms have offered a striking entry into the canon of sprawling contemplative drone, a long-form exercise in immersive sound that exists in an undefined gray area between meandering juxtapositions of varied elements and single-minded devotion to whichever idea is closest at hand. By referencing standard preconceptions of such music without fully giving way to them, the band is able to create an album that doesn’t adhere too strongly to any particular moment and craft an aesthetic that often seems more aligned with the work of Paul Bowles or Alejandro Jodorowsky than with any musician – an evocation of open, arid spaces and the terror and redemption that can arise therein.
Date Palms – Honey Devash (Mexican Summer Records)
With their sophomore release, California duo Date Palms have offered a striking entry into the canon of sprawling contemplative drone, a long-form exercise in immersive sound that exists in an undefined gray area between meandering juxtapositions of varied elements and single-minded devotion to whichever idea is closest at hand. By referencing standard preconceptions of such music without fully giving way to them, the band is able to create an album that doesn’t adhere too strongly to any particular moment and craft an aesthetic that often seems more aligned with the work of Paul Bowles or Alejandro Jodorowsky than with any musician – an evocation of open, arid spaces and the terror and redemption that can arise therein.
What may prove disconcerting to a casual listener is that Honey Devash doesn’t really do much of anything, instead opting for minimal, interlocking motifs that develop and sustain a mood without seeking a particular endpoint. It would be easy to lump the album in with some variation of ambient music, but too many shifts are present, subtle though they may be, most notably a regular addition and subtraction of instruments that might work at odds with any use of the album as background music. But while these moments may prove the only abrupt ones at work on the album, a thorough examination of any individual instrument’s role would be woefully inadequate – each does little enough that it might seem uninteresting taken from its context, but excels when woven together with the other elements, each facet pushing the others forward towards a cohesive whole that’s more than the sum of its parts.
The album’s title track, the first of its two side-long compositions, locks into a sinister, minor-key synthesizer drone that lasts the extent of the its fourteen minute length, and is augmented with eerie violin, meandering keyboard melody, and low-end bass rumble. The tense mood places the song leagues apart from the escapism of the trance-inducing minimalism that many comparable artists attempt, instead conjuring images of unfamiliar open spaces and the dread that can be borne of thorough disorientation. The album’s second half, “Honey Dune” shifts the mood away from its predecessor’s ominous overtones, opting for a more ethereal haze. On paper, the composition’s use of tamboura and flute overlaid upon oscillating synthesizer might sound like New Age exotica, but it hardly seems that way on the album itself. While the opener was a somewhat stronger piece, its companion provides a well-executed counterpoint, balancing out the darker side of the music and emphasizing Date Palms’ ability to operate on the periphery of preconception, creating music that works against genre tropes and reveals deeper layers with each listen.
