Album Review: Palma Violets - 180

Palma Violets have earned themselves a bit of a reputation with their impromptu gigs and regular parties that they held at their house in Lambeth, UK. Up until fairly recently, they kept their internet presence to a bare minimum, with no recorded music available online. It almost seems like a marketing strategy (a highly flawed one with the high probability of backfiring horribly), but the British four-piece simply wanted to play shows. Their desire to create raw music just for the love of it really shines through in their debut album, 180.

You can tell these guys are having a great time; it's obvious from the first chorus of the album's opener, Best Of Friends. The booming vocals push through a wall of jangly guitar and swirling psych sounds, but what really sets the exciting pace is the production (spearheaded by Steve Mackey of Pulp). It's in the more atmospheric tracks like All The Garden Birds and Chicken Dippers that the band's intensity is really shown off, but Johnny Bagga' Donuts and the cheeky closer 14 play around with that intensity and turn it into something a little more fun.

I never really understood what N'Sync meant by 'dirty pop', but that description seems to fit Palma Violets perfectly. There's a scrappiness to their music – predominately in the lightly reverberated vocals that sound almost as though they've been recorded in a concrete tunnel – but a distinct crispness that has each element tidily cooperating throughout all the racket. So maybe that wasn't what N'Sync were getting at, but hey – the shoe fits.