The Tiny Desk is working from home for the foreseeable future. Introducing NPR Music s Tiny Desk (home) concerts, bringing you performances from across the country and the world. It s the same spirit stripped-down sets, an intimate setting just a different space.
While many of us have gotten better at using technology to feel close to our friends and collaborators over the past year, there s still no replacement for being in the same room as someone who you swear can read your mind. That s what it feels like to watch punk band Palberta, whose music makes magic out of repeated phrases sung in tight harmony and charmingly zany pop hooks. For its Tiny Desk (home) concert, shot on a MiniDV and a Hi8, the band crams into one member s Philly basement for a set that s a testament to the group s tight-knit collaboration and playful exuberance.
• Feb 3, 2021
Woody Guthrie s This Land Is Your Land has long been offered as an alternative national anthem, performed by musicians from Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger to Chicano Batman and Sharon Jones. Its message seems fairly simple we are all equally entitled to the rights of this country, including the land we stand on. But Native Americans will just as soon point out that the core of the song, that this land was made for you and me, is a wholly colonialist message.
The most interesting thing about Palberta’s new album
Palberta5000 is most certainly the transformation of this New York City trio from relentlessly noisy, DIY post-punk heroes into an archetypal indie-pop band, albeit one with a backburnered proclivity for chaos and razor-sharp edges framing its soft, sweet center.
But the most
amazing thing about
Palberta5000 is that Palberta Ani Ivry-Block, Lily Konigsberg and Nina Ryser, who are known to take turns on bass, drums and guitar effectively captured that transformation in a four-day recording session at the Hudson Valley studio of engineer Matt Labozza, who also worked on the Philly band Palm’s 2018 art-rock banger
Palberta Blends Big-Tent Pop and Art-Rock on âPalberta5000â
The New York trio remains gleefully odd on an album recorded in just four days.
Nina Ryser, Ani Ivry-Block, Lily Konigsberg of Palberta trade instruments and sing in tight harmonies.Credit.Chloe Carrasco
By Lindsay Zoladz
Jan. 21, 2021
Palberta is a three-piece rock band without a guitarist, a bassist or a drummer. Or, to put it another way, Palberta is a band with three of each of those things: Onstage and on its records, Ani Ivry-Block, Lily Konigsberg and Nina Ryser trade instruments between nearly every song and harmonize with a near familial tightness that makes the very notion of a frontperson seem absurd. âIt kind of feels like we share a brain in a lot of ways, at this point,â Konisberg said in 2018. It kind of sounds like that, too.