Although punk may not be remembered as a particularly didactic kind of music, its great practitioners did teach us a valuable lesson. When you listen to Pere Ubu’s 1976 track “Final Solution” or The Clash’s 1977 song “Remote Control,” you get the idea that dystopias are just another opportunity for someone to write a pop song. In other words, punk — and its more commercially friendly offshoot, post-punk — embraced the concept of societal collapse while sending up the idea as faintly absurd. What’s fascinating about Nashville post-punk band Palm Ghosts’ Lifeboat Candidate, out March 19, is how completely the group buys into the notion that anarchy has arrived, courtesy of the McConnell-Trump era.
The band’s strategy may seem retro, and Palm Ghosts certainly take their cues from innovators in and around post-punk like The Psychedelic Furs and Peter Gabriel. You can also hear hints of David Bowie, himself an essential originator of the doom-laden rock of the 1980s. Still, Lifeboat Candidate avoids the trap of homage. The band’s music is plenty catchy, and the angst is simply part of the package.
Despite its stylistic flourishes, the songwriting on Lifeboat Candidate often harks back to a style of British Invasion rock that favored well-defined bridges and choruses. It’s a record that manages to be both tense and relaxed — every drum part springs into post-punk space, but the songs are structured in traditional ways. For singer and songwriter Joseph Lekkas, who started Palm Ghosts in Philadelphia eight years ago, the group’s new music builds upon his earlier work.
“The influences were more like roots, indie-folk kind of stuff, and a lot of psychedelic stuff,” Lekkas says from his Nashville home, referring to Palm Ghosts’ eponymous 2014 debut. He recorded Palm Ghosts in Philadelphia before moving to Nashville later that year. Soon after he moved to town, he began collaborating with future Palm Ghosts member Benjamin Douglas, who had also recently relocated to Nashville. “I mean, I still love early Floyd, so I was doing more of that kind of stuff. It ended up being more like a rootsy-type sound.”
The indie-folk vibe of Palm Ghosts comes through most clearly on that album’s “Airplane Jane,” an Americana tune with a straightforward narrative. The group’s second album, 2017’s Greenland, continued in the same vein, with nods to R.E.M.’s jangle pop. The fog of dystopia set in for 2018’s Architecture, and Lifeboat Candidate sets sail in the mist. The record flawlessly updates the sound of the post-punk ’80s, making it a worthy companion to The Psychedelic Furs’ 1982 release Forever Now.
Lifeboat Candidate isn’t a mere pastiche: Lekkas sings in the tones of Psychedelic Furs frontman Richard Butler, but the album registers as both post-punk and contemporary to the pandemic. As Lekkas explains, the album was written collectively, starting with iPhone recordings created by drummer Walt Epting in New Jersey.
“He would send the drum parts, and I would piece together these grooves, and I would play bass on them and kind of come up with the song structure,” Lekkas says. “Then we’d send it to [guitarist Jason Springman]. Then we’d send it to Ben, who would write melody and vocal.”
Like the Forever Now standout “President Gas,” Lifeboat works as dystopian pop, and the relentless anti-groove might induce you to gyrate as you contemplate the world’s uncertain future. Every track works — Springman adds melodic licks that help define the music. I’m not sure what “Revelation Engines” signifies, beyond an evocation of societal breakdown, but it’s a superb soundscape: dance music for an age of chaos.
Elsewhere, “The Kids” includes a guitar figure that connects the song to the heyday of The Beatles and The Byrds, before popular music started to describe the end of the world. It’s a first-rate song, and listening to it will put you in mind of the kind of dystopia that only pop is equipped to deal with.
