Song Review - Palace

Palace

by The Antlers

Album: Familiars (out June 2014)

It's always these ones, the songs that creep up, that cause the thoughts upon thoughts and convince you they were written just for you and those songs that give a little gentle squeeze that I love the most. The thoughts? Inspired by the title, immediate thoughts of a traditional palace; somewhere impressive, a physical place, often admired by many, somewhere filled with lots of details and pretty edges. Somewhere most think only a select few will ever get to reside and call home, but something we all slowly make for ourselves.


Then come the sweet keys, the sentimental horns and the lyrics...oh the lyrics that cause the thoughts upon the thoughts to come tumbling down.


A palace after all is somewhere impressive, but impressive means different things to different people. Admired by many, but does that really matter? If just a handful truly love said palace, whether that be a mansion or just some humble walls, then isn’t that better than a thousand with only passing interest? In every size palace, the details are important, but not what the details are. It’s the details that hold the true value, the true stories, the heartbroken and the loved. Large is a matter of opinion, because a hundred rooms are nice, but if a couple of rooms hold the sweetest memories than what is the point of the rest?


The Antlers explore all the concepts of love and life in the simplest way in their latest clip for ‘Palace’ with the sad sights of someone’s own lost palace forcing questions about the concepts of time and objects and love, all the life questions that beautiful music sometimes forces you to face. It’s passionate and lonely, it’s hopeful and it’s melancholy, it’s the saddest lullaby and the sweetest story all at once and as one who as always wrestled with the concepts of what actually matters in this little life of mine, I was destined to adore the lyrics from the moment I heard them, because after all, it's not really about a place called a palace, it's all about the feelings....


“…if we can carpenter a home in our heart right now and carve a palace from within, 
we won’t need to take a ton of pictures,
it won’t be easy to believe,
the day we wake inside a secret place that everyone can see. …”

Jo Michelmore gives 'Palace' four and a half Thom Yorke heads out of five...