Sydney Eloise & The Palms
From the opening “Be My Baby”-style drumbeat and retro-modern psychedelic swirls of lead track “Always Sailing,” Sydney Eloise & the Palms’ new debut Faces is searching and bittersweet, a classic-pop meditation from the visionary twentysomething next door. A vivid sonic slide-show carousel of a record, its mix of words and music paint tiny, episodic masterpieces in technicolor.
Sydney Eloise is at once catalyst, vessel and torchbearer. With her close friends and collaborators—co-producers Damon Moon and Chandler Galloway (Coma Girls)—she spent an entire year building and rebuilding Faces in the studio until it felt just right, the end result a delicate ship in a bottle of Fernet-Branca, a charming contemporary pastiche that draws tastefully from every decade of recorded music since the 1950s, right up ’til the present day. Inside the record’s lush layers of daydreamy sound, you’ll find a musical education—’50s “Earth Angel” balladry, Phil Spector-style Walls of Sound, heady ’60s psych pop, ’70s Laurel Canyon country dusted with post-Beatles George Harrison sonics, unmistakable Fleetwood Mac-isms and crystalline ABBA-style pop, subtle ’80s production flourishes, glistening ’90s-alt country and ’00s indie pop a la Neko Case and Rilo Kiley. Layers upon layers, worlds within worlds—visions of boot-clad go-go girls shimmying in perfect beehive mini-skirt bliss in a snow globe inside of a snow globe inside of a snow globe.
