Back At It With Palberta
By, Sam Weisenthal, Contributor
Photo by, Chloe Carrasco
Meet Palberta
We are so lucky to once again have Palberta here on The Family Reviews. The trio has been putting down some of the most innovative rock tunes out of the NYC area. Their latest album ‘Palberta5000’ is a great example of this band’s ability to continue to change and experiment with their own special brand of post-post-post-punk greatness. Our writer Sam sat down with Lily Konigsberg to talk about all kinds of great things. Give it a read and listen to the new tunes.
How are you doing?
I’m doing well! I just babysat an actual covid baby for the last week so I’m kind of tired because it’s a lot, but they were very cute. The baby has never seen anything.
Wow, that’s a lot!
Yeah, but he was pretty cute and warmed up pretty fast.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how babies haven’t seen faces and facial expressions because of the masks, do you think that’s affected the baby?
Well, the parents said that he’s really good at telling what’s going on behind people's eyes because he sees a lot of eyes. But he’s a total baby, we played peekaboo and he was laughing really hard and it delights him every time. It seems like he was afraid of strangers but I feel like that’s normal too? So, I don't know, Baby’s are adaptable!
S: What was the first song that you came up with for your most recent album Palberta5000 and what was the last song?
I kind of think that the one called I’m Z’done, the instrumental must have been the last one because we figured out that we could play the jeopardy song in our own way and we thought it was really funny and it just sounded good, it sounded like a Palberta song. We were noodling around and thought, “We should add this to the album! This is a funny idea, this is an interesting idea.” The first one, I truly don’t know, we release an album and then we write songs. We meet - Nina lives in Philly and Ani and I live in New York City - and we just write and play the songs live, we don’t really save them. And then we record an album one and a half years or two years later. I don’t remember which ones came first because it just kind of blends into everything.
How do you manage being in different states?
It’s actually perfect for us because we all have a lot of pursuits other than Palberta. We spend probably a third of our creative energy in Palberta and then we all do separate things. We meet up once a month because we are also best friends, and we play and write new songs and catch up and hangout. It’s really not bad because Nina is starting a community garden in Philly, I’m taking massage therapy classes, Ani has been art handling and working on other things, and then we all have solo music and are in other bands, so it works for us.
Do you feel like you would identify as a Brooklyn band or do you associate more closely with Philly.
We play in Philly but we were all born in Brooklyn and Manhattan so we would all say we’re from New York.
I loved the music videos that you guys did, they’re so fun and strange! Can you tell me the story of how you came up with each of them and how you shot them?
We each took one because there were three songs, so I did “Before I Got Here”. I made a concept and filmed it and did all of that myself, and then Nina did “Corner Store”, and Ani did “The Way That You Do”. If anyone knows our work outside of Palberta it really makes sense, because they are all kind of conceptually different. Mine’s kind of all over the place and from a bunch of found footage. Ani has a very extensive youtube channel full of video art, she uses video in her performance art - it’s very her and it feels like no one else could have thought of it. Nina used a storyboard outline, she thought through what the video was going to be like from A-Z, which is kind of her, planned out and done really well. We each took the reins on each one.
Do you feel like you took inspiration from any specific music video you’ve seen or did it come from somewhere else for you?
The song I did, “Before I Got Here”, has a very long outro, it’s the last song on the album. I had a concept for the beginning... basically Palberta never thinks about inspiration from anywhere other than ourselves because we are just a funny dynamic. We don’t really need to be like, “We want it to look like this, or sound like that,” because it’s just kind of about who we are as these three people and musicians. I didn’t know what to do for the last part of the music video, and I had the idea that the song sounds like a montage of memory, so I just found all of this footage of us on tour throughout the years, which actually ended up being kind of emotional.
I was going to ask, what was your favorite venue to play at before the pandemic - and I know you’re planning on going on tour. What are you guys excited about in terms of that?
We always loved playing at the Glove in Bushwick - It closed last summer after three years. It was a DIY venue and we played there so many times, it was a really supportive community which is great. We had a European tour planned for May of 2019 but that obviously didn’t happen, so the next tour we are going to go on is probably to Europe whenever that’s possible. Right now we are just kind of meeting up, we are probably going to do some kind of live online experience of our album. We will probably start working on new songs at some point, but for now we’re focused on writing and playing together.
How are you connecting with fans right now during the pandemic since you can’t play live shows?
We ended up releasing the album because there’s not much to do other than stay at home, so it’s nice to have new music to listen to and we didn't want to keep it under our belts for that long - we wanted to release it and see what they thought and give them new music. I guess we are going to do a live performance that you can interact with online at some point so that’s how we are going to be connecting with our fans. And the other way is just releasing the album and showing them what we’ve been working on.
Did you shoot the music videos during the pandemic?
Yeah, that’s why they’re all just the three of us.
The one with the dancing was really cool, it felt like a strong DIY vibe.
Yeah that was mine. I have been watching TikTok and I wanted to make a Palberta TikTok dance, but we couldn’t get it down so we messed it up a bunch. Our arms are at different places in different times.
TikTok has really blown up, have you thought about being on TikTok as a band?
I’m the only one who watches TikTok. I find it fascinating because a lot of people are getting help through it. People that are in really bad abusive homes will connect and find support through the app and try to help one another out of their situation. With all the political stuff going on it shows you how smart GenZ is in a lot of ways that are really refreshing. Ani and Nina don’t have TikTok and I don't feel like I have a lot to bring to it. I’m not much of an internet person and neither are they so I don’t foresee it happening - but it’s an interesting platform.
How do you feel like the dynamic of your friendship has influenced and changed the music you make together?
Our friendship started with the band, we just ended up becoming best friends through the band. We’ve grown together and become like sisters and friends at the same time. Our growth as people, as friends, and as musicians is all happening at the same time. It’s kind of amazing that we get to see each other grow and change and then hear the music grow and change. Some people have been saying in reviews that we are trying to sound different, but it actually just happened organically. We’ve gotten older, we’re all 28 or 29, and our sound has changed because we’ve been growing together.
When you were first forming the band how did you connect if you weren’t already close?
Nina knew both me and Ani and she organized a solo show where we all played sets. After the show, we said we should jam because all of our sets were interesting and different, but had some overlap. That summer we jammed and after that, we continued to do it but never explicitly said or had a conscious conversation about forming a band. It just happened organically.
Is this the first album that you recorded in a studio?
Our friend Paco from the cradle has recorded everything on reel to reel and four-track in different places for all the albums except this one where we went to our friend Matt Laboza’s studio. There was more equipment and we were all able to record our vocals a lot more clearly. He set up the studio, it was in PeeWee Herman’s childhood home which was weird. It was a more fluid process because we weren’t moving everything into a space and setting it up, it was already set up for us.
How do you think that affected the creative process behind the recording?
I think it was a little less stressful to find the sound, everything was figured out in terms of where we were going to be recording things and how we were going to be recording the vocals. We could relax and enjoy playing the songs. Each one we did two to four times and then picked the best one. We hardly did any overdubs, it just sounded good the way it was. We were really ready to record and the setup was ready for us, which was a more fluid process. Not to say that we didn't enjoy the other processes of the other albums, but it made it slightly more smooth.
This is a random question but I was thinking about this the other day… What do you think is your dream lineup to see and what is your dream lineup to be a part of.
Oh, that’s hard. This is me, Lily. I would want to see Ariana Grande again because I saw her once and I was too far away, and it was amazing but I wanted to be in the front. I really want to see Justin Bieber with Ani and Nina because they love him too, we were going to see him but it got canceled because of Covid. I would love to see Kanye. I’m kind of doing a dream thing because these are people I would have to spend a lot of money to see. I would like Elliot Smith to come back from the dead and just hang out with him. I don’t really want to see him but I would like to hang out and be like, “Good thing you’re not dead”.
He’d be like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Yeah, he’d be like, “You’re crazy!” And then to play in... I would want to play in that lineup.
That’s awesome. Is there an album that came out in the last year that you wanted to see live?
I feel like it’s getting skewed in interviews, we listen to a lot of DIY music and we support those people, but we also all happen to really like Justin Beiber. We were going to see his new album changes, which got pretty bad reviews but I think it’s very beautiful, it’s a very vocally focused album and his voice is amazing in it. We were excited to see that and we think the album is underrated. I’ve also always wanted to see Kanye too because he gives a really good live performance.
You’re bringing up a lot of Pop artists, I’ve read in reviews that critics are saying that it’s a poppier punk album, how do you feel about that?
I think that people really love the album, and it’s really nice to get good feedback. Everyone should say how they feel about the new sound but again, it wasn’t purposeful, we actually just have grown and were recorded by a new person and the vocals are more clear because we each actually sang in a microphone on our own separately, we usually sing all together. We have gotten better at playing our instruments and wrote some pop songs. If people do research into our past they would know that we have all been writing different music than Palberta type of music for a long time. I was writing pop songs before Palberta existed, so pop is a big part of our lives and always has been. I think they think we said, “Let’s be a Pop band now,” but that's not really what happened. It sounds more accessible but it still has that weird Palberta stuff going on that we can’t really control, and we wouldn't want to control it, it’s out of our hands.
Totally. Last question, is there anything that you want to say directly to your fans right now?
I just want to say that we really miss performing live and we miss performing for them, and we miss them performing for us because a lot of our fans are musicians. We miss live music and we’ll be back.
Dundundundun
It’s a threat