Palmistry: PAGAN

Like other artists with jarringly idiosyncratic styles, Palmistry is often pinned down with the same arsenal of descriptors: bedroom dance-pop, lo-fi electronica, tip-toed dancehall for fragile souls. However, these descriptors all presuppose that Palmistry is ushering the dance floor behind closed doors, rather than opening these doors and imbuing the dance floor with what lurked behind them. The latter approximates the core of his music: he’s an introvert imposing his private world — a place of deep intimacy, fingertip-across-flesh caresses, and hushed longing — onto the club scene that surrounds him, not someone who simply observes the intensities of this scene, takes them home, and molds them in secret. On PAGAN, his debut full-length on the well-esteemed Mixpak imprint, he throws himself headfirst into this world. Here, from the vaporous mumblecore of “Club Aso” to the cloying whisper-pageantry of “Sweetness”, alt-dancehall purveyor Benjy Keating demarcates a sonic space where paralyzingly shy homebodies indulge in their innermost impulses out in public, like the open air is a locked room.

Throughout the record, Keating adopts a kind of half-finished argot — a language of breaths, stammers, and syllable-wisps, one that could just as plausibly originate from some hermetic diary-speak as from an obscure, fictive civilization. “And I miss you like that / Like this, like that, mmhm, a-ha”, he sings in standout track “Lifted”, and each nonsensical vocal effusion of air and melody that he utters, each “mmhm” and “a-ha”, seems to exist as an actual word for him, a linguistic unit that bears a formal meaning and coherent shape in his private lexicon.

In “Lifted”, “mmhm” is more than a fleeting sound; it’s a specification: this is exactly how I miss you, and “a-ha” is exactly how much I miss you. For the listener, though, these effusions remain firmly inscrutable. This fabricated tongue of whispers, whines, and woeful mutterings is half of what makes Keating’s trademark aesthetic, and it saturates the LP from start to finish. “Then, we rup and we rup and we rup”, he sings in “L After L”, and even though “rup” emits no literal meaning or connotation, we understand its significance to Keating. Perhaps, in the world of PAGAN, that’s all that matters.

The other half of Keating’s aesthetic is a continuous ripple of staccato synth pulses. In almost every track on the record, he seems to sing around these pulses, to sing on top of them and through them, but they don’t seem to belong to any one individual song; rather, they’re just there, surging beneath PAGAN as a whole — aspects of a current running parallel to Keating’s bloodstream, not heartbeats necessarily, but beats stepping in time with his every impulse, his every inhibition and retreat, beats that match the rising and falling of his endlessly shapeshifting desires. These pulses nearly subsume “Lifted”, but they’re omnipresent. “Beamer”, “Club Aso”, “Paigon”, and “Sip”, to name just a few more, all build around them, and the effect is often one of subtle mesmerism.

If these pulses are part of a current, then this current began in “Memory Taffeta”, Keating’s 2015 breakout single and the song that remains the purest distillation of his approach. Unequivocally, it’s a pop confection, but the ingredients that crystallize its sweetness deserve additional scrutiny: soft-voiced R&B, dancehall, James Blake ghost-electro, syncopated rhythms, melancholic melodies, and, of course, a concatenation of synth pulses that seem to at once flow around Keating’s voice and push it upward. “Anyway, those thoughts can take you under / I should be much stronger”, he begins the first verse, and you can feel this “under” right beneath the track’s substance, a nether-reality where Keating shuts himself up and lets his self-consciousness get the better of him, but the piercing insistence of the synth keeps him singing, moving, breathing, keeps him afloat in the same world of unashamed introversion that he creates in his lyrics.

Without argument, PAGAN is a record that adheres to a formula. If this formula intrigues or excites you, then the record is littered with moments of surprising beauty; if not, then it sounds uniform, bare, bereft of anything substantive to say or evocative to suggest. What should also be said, though, is that this formula seems to arise from an absolute singularity of musical vision — a vision that draws from a limited amount of sonic resources, but that also acknowledges that these resources are the best means available for honest self-expression. You’re invited into my world for a while, Keating seems to suggest, come inside or close the door on your way out.