- Erica Dunn is certainly under no obligation to make more music, right now. As a key player in Mod Con, Tropical Fuck Storm and of course, Harmony, the guitar slinging singer-songwriter has had an extremely accomplished few years. She has so much music though, it shouldn’t really be surprising that she has more. In fact, she has a whole other project that’s been bubbling away, quietly, for years, the name of which is Palm Springs.
Right now it’s an outlet for things which don’t fit into her other projects. As a result, although Palm Springs has rocked in a dusty, country manner in the past, contemporarily it’s taken on a folky troubadour aspect, as can be heard on the late 2018 release, Palm Springs & Friends. Interestingly, although the music on this record doesn’t “fit” into her other acts, these songs aren’t offcuts from them. Rather, having finished an intense period of creativity in 2017, Dunn was due to attend an artist-in-residency programme in New York and rather than falling in an exhausted heap, wrote everything you’ll hear here.
It’s quite a sparse sound and that’s despite the friends from the title. These include partner Paul Pirie on percussion and bass and Steph Hughes contributing extra guitar, vocals and even a pump organ. Dunn’s acrobatic skill on her acoustic means that sparseness is only ever a relative thing. From end to end the record has a focused, room-filling intensity. I struggle to find the right comparison, but it’s comparable, in some ways to the intimate energy of Nick Drake’s bedroom sketches. Erica Dunn is much more emotionally balanced than that though: even when the music at its most melancholy, on a song like Ain’t Gonna, Palm Springs’ wry humour and sense of self is palpable.
The rawness of the recordings: a jangly line here, a bum note there and the occasional, undeniably fuzzy peak have attracted labels like ‘outsider-folk’, although this doesn’t sound like more recent entries in the genre. Certainly this has little in common with the latter-day Vashti Bunyan. Instead I’m put in mind of more of those endless sketches that folkies of the ‘60s would create, compulsively. Not that long ago I listened to hours of beautiful fragments by Sandy Denny and I’m reminded of them here.
Some other folks have pointed to a Springsteen influence, which is certainly justified and then it’s just a short leap from there to realise that Palm Springs And Friends has at least as much in common with Erica’s other great lofi outfit, Harmony, as anything else; perhaps more so. They’re not exactly the same, by any stretch. Instead Palm Springs, right now, sounds like the folk record that Harmony never made and, while Tom Lyngcoln cuts into ever bleaker territory in his music, it only makes the emotional strength of Erica Dunn’s work that much more appreciable. Palm Springs & Friends wears the tatterdemalion clothes of the roving troubadour like a world-famous musician taking to the streets incognito, to busk. In both cases it’s quite possible to miss that there's something going on, that's magnificent.
- Chris Cobcroft.