Palette Knife’s debut album, Ponderosa Snake House and the Chamber of Bullshit, is an exacting slice of 5^th wave emo (is anyone really keeping count anymore?) inspired pop-punk. The Columbus, Ohio trio have clearly studied diligently and demonstrate that across 11 tracks. Frontman Alec Licata leads with a penchant for turning tight guitar riffs into noodly tapping that looks toward math rock. His almost sugary voice balances out thanks to the post-hardcore upbringings of drummer Aaron Queener (who brings skramz-inspired screaming to the mix) and bassist Chris McGrath.

That familiar sound, however, covers a plethora of pointed cultural references from Studio Ghibli and Fullmetal Alchemist to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Death Cab For Cutie. The whole album comes wrapped in an equal parts nerdy and endearing Dungeons & Dragons package. It can be a lot to keep track of. Licata joined with us for a quest to unlock some of the secrets of the snake house.

Ponderosa Snake House

You open with a sample that I can’t quite make out, something about eating a favorite food for every meal. Why put that at the top of the album?

[Laughs] It’s actually from Scott Pilgrim. And it’s the part where he’s talking about garlic bread and he loves it and he’s like ‘I want to eat this forever’ and she’s like ‘you would get fat’ and he’s like ‘bread makes you fat?’ We opened up with that because I think one of the things that kind of inspired Palette Knife was a lot of the late 2000s twinkly emo bands that I was listening to at the time. A lot of them incorporate samples from rom-coms and stuff like that so we kind of wanted to engage in that conversation, maybe even lightly satirize, by including it in but in a way that feels genuine because we’re not making fun of bands that do that, because we just wanted to do that on a song.

“Ponderosa Snake House” is kind of a love song at its core. So, I feel like that was just a good quote to include that kind of awkward romantic interaction.

“Ponderosa Snake House” is part of the whole Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, which is nice because this song also has the lines about cheat codes and quickly beating indie games—how big of gamers are you actually?

I’m probably the biggest gamer followed by—Aaron and Chris might be tied. I don’t know quite as well their gaming habits. We just wanted to include that because I like video game stuff, like it’s one of my fixations. Some bands reference video game stuff, but I feel like there was kind of a need for it, if that makes sense—at least in the genre. It also ties back into like the humor and relatability that we try to go for.

Kidz in Wigz

The thing that really stuck out to me in this song was the bridge section. It’s kind of a left turn from the rest of it. How’d you wind up with that?

We’re really trying to get more progressive song structures, which isn’t something we started thinking about until maybe half the songs on the record we’re written because a lot of the songs were written kind of on the tail end slash during [writing the EP] Self Preservation, so “Kidz and Wigz” has that kind of more poppy verse-chorus, verse-chorus structure so we wanted to give an instrumental break to sort of bring some more progressive style into it.

You also have a lot of guitar sounds that layer on there. Across your releases you seem to be adding on more guitar pedals and building your guitars and so on.

It’s funny you say that because on our music prior to the record we only had one guitar—we had the telecaster. We would fiddle with the settings to get two guitar sounds across but when we did the record this is the first time we had two physical guitars. So I used my telecaster for some of the brighter guitar noises or like leads that I wanted to be a little bit cleaner and then I used my ‘powercaster’ [a LaCroix themed guitar Licata built from parts], which is a really dumb name for a guitar. It has a humbucker [pickup] on it, so we used that for more of the heavier rhythm sections just to get a little more bitey tone.

Studio Ghibli Reference

Obvious question here: is Spirited Away the best of the Ghibli films?

That’s a loaded question. In terms of re-watchability I think so. I think that is the movie in that roster I could watch the most times and get the least sick of. But I think Howl’s Moving Castle might be Miyazaki’s best film. This is reinforced by a video essay I watched by BREADSWORD a few weeks ago. He just talked about how it’s really a culmination of his, not tropes, but Miyazaki-isms, distilled and kind of perfected, which also goes hand in hand because it’s like the peak of his style of animation too. The film is so insanely detailed.

The Only Difference Between Smough and Ornstein Is Press Coverage

Totally got me on this one. I had no idea who either of those characters were and had to look them up. How do Smough and Ornstein from the game Dark Souls relate to this song?

They actually do. I know we have all the really dumb song titles, but I feel like my one rule is it has to connect in some vague and subtle way to the song title even if it’s something that only makes sense to me. Smough and Ornstein is about like friendship as platonic but also maybe not platonic. So Smough and Ornstein, I’m seeing myself and the person I’m singing about in this song as like partners in crime like Smough and Ornstein, who are a very challenging and famous boss from Dark Souls. They compliment each other as partners would.

Throughout the album, but also on this song specifically, you have a distinct lyrical style where you tend not to rhyme very often and you also tend to cut your lines up across musical phrases in a way that’s very opposed to how we would cut things up in conversation. In this one, the section that sticks out to me is “hello, have we met before?” How do you go about writing lyrics?

Oh, gosh. I hate writing lyrics. It is the last thing that happens to the song. I think when I was younger I really loved rhyming lyrics and, like you said, dividing things equally and expectedly on a musical phrase but really one of the things that got me out of that was when I started listening to more like folk-punk in college. Particularly emo-tinged folk-punk like The Front Bottoms, who you’re familiar with, that tend to either not rhyme or not care or even break—I don’t know what it’s called but when you break from singing to almost talking and kind of skirt that line between the two. I think that’s really what got me interested in that. Because it’s so different from singing than what I’m used to, it feels natural now.

I think I like cutting off a phrase short and sticking it on the next line because it almost makes you pay attention to it more because the phrase ends and you’re like ‘what?’ and then it comes back on the next part.

Colorblind Sunglasses

The opening car noise is brilliant. Is it actually a turning signal sampled for the rest of the song?

Yes. That’s my 2008 Mazda. R.I.P.

A lot of these songs seem to have references to driving or travelling, this is kind of the centerpiece, and from here it seems to pick up even more. Was that an intentional theme that you worked with, or did it develop as you were writing?

It kind of developed as we were writing. We really wanted to play around with the song from an artsy perspective because it’s like the only song on the record that’s really stripped back so we knew we wanted to have more of that weird like diegetic car noise thing going and at the end we wanted to have that sort of falling apart movie reel effect especially because—well, we didn’t know we were going to be getting vinyl at the time—but we have that timed perfectly so that should be the end of side A which I’m really stoked about.

Remind me the colors that you’re colorblind to?

I have protanopia which is a style of red-green colorblindness which mean my red cones are weak so things with red in them look kind of funky to me. Like when I see purple, my eyes see the blue in the purple but they don’t necessarily see the red so purple just looks blue to me.

And how challenging is that from a design and art perspective?

Pretty challenging when it comes to skin tones, because skin tones have a lot of reds and pinks in them, but otherwise it’s not super detrimental, especially because I work digitally so I can look what percentage of what inks are making up a color and I can kind of deduce things from there, but regardless I always like to get a second set of eyes especially when it’s something going to print.

Did you actually have colorblind sunglasses and did you ever get them back?

I did have colorblind sunglasses. They didn’t work. And I no longer have them.

Sorryisnore

This one’s a lot more straightforward in terms of the songwriting and song structure. What is the songwriting process like as a band?

Our current songwriting process is I come to Aaron and Chris with a song skeleton that’s essentially a few riffs and a few chord progressions in like a vague order and I get them up to speed on that and from there they help me rearrange things or try something different here or there to write it in. We’re all kind of working toward the same goal, like if we want to make it a little more progressive in this area we’ll do that or if we’re like ‘this is a little wacky, let’s tighten up this one section, make it a little bit more hooky’ we’ll do that as well.

Like I said, lyrics kind of come last, which is all me. It’s really great writing with them, because I feel like we all only add to each other’s ideas. There’s not a lot of pushing on each other and I think the reason this album feels even more like Palette Knife than Self Preservation is because we went into all of the songs with that mindset. Our first EP we’ve taken off Spotify. When it comes down to it those were my solo project songs with a backing band. Plus there’s the maturity aspect of the songwriting.

Now, more importantly, tell me about your song-titling process. How much time do you spend coming up with your song titles versus your actual songs?

[Laughs] We have a note in our notes app of silly things that are under constant review for song titles. Once we write a song, if we don’t have something that’s immediately present, we’ll dig in there and figure out what fits. It usually has to be silly or long but also, like I mentioned earlier, it has to vaguely tie into the lyrics. It’s usually silly phrases that someone will say and we’re like ‘oh, we need to remember that.’

Hungover Brunch at Tiffany’s

No questions about the title, I think it’s a pretty obvious Breakfast at Tiffany’s reference. A lot of the album has those mathy things, more complex rhythmic ideas. This one starts to lean into it a little more and even has, to me, one of the more notable odd time signatures in the bridge. How naturally does that come for you or the band in general?

It comes most naturally to Aaron just because he’s a drummer and can switch between time signatures pretty easily. It definitely comes less naturally to me and Chris, but we knew that we wanted to push ourselves here and there. Like I mentioned earlier, we’re constantly trying to get more progressive in our songwriting and get some of the true math rock bands to maybe take us a little bit more seriously on that front [laughs]. We’d had that bridge written for a while and we still felt like the song needed something. So, one day I was like ‘hey let’s do the bridge in 5/4 [time] because that would be weird as hell and cool because it’s unexpected.’ It took us a little bit to get used to it, especially to sing on top of it because singing in 5/4 is very hard, at least for me. We just practiced it a shit ton and we really love it now.

“Hungover Brunch” is one of the more structurally progressive songs. Aaron really gets to show off a lot

Oh my God! His fills in the second verse are one of my favorite parts on the record. They’re so good.

Yeah, definitely one of his more free moments. He’s got a lot of fills, lot of changing the feel. Do you find that he pushes the band in a heavier, more intricate direction?

Yeah, I think so. Not in a bad way either. I think when we were starting out he was like ‘yeah, we’re gonna add skramz everywhere!’ And I was like ‘um, maybe not, maybe at the tail end of [“Venmo Still Thinks We’re Friends, Pt. 1”]. Now whenever he’s like ‘let’s add screams here’ I’m like ‘yes, do it.’ My main reason for that is because my older music that I was writing by myself was very poppy and my vocals are very bright in that way, so I think whenever he has an idea to make the band heavier it always balances out perfectly with the more sugary, sweet side of my songwriting. It really helps bring things back to a middle ground. I love whenever he incorporates his post-hardcore background.

Codename: Fireball

Is this song referring to the same New Year as “Hungover Brunch”?

It’s not, but that’s why we put them together on the album, because it felt like it was creating more of a story.

As you move later in the album it seems to become more thematically connected across songs.

Yeah, and that’s the other reason we have those crickets in there because it kind of subtly foreshadows the ending track.

TFW Vine Is Dead and So Are We

This track features members of Snarls, who are from Columbus but are also Take This To Heart labelmates. Did you get to know them better because of Take This To Heart or before?

Both. Snarls was one of those bands that when Palette Knife started we were like ‘oh my god, it would be crazy if we could get on a show with Snarls’ and then one day it happened and we were so ecstatic. When you’re in a scene with bands, you just kind of gradually get to know everyone. So over the past years we just got that kind of casual band friendship going. When we recorded the record last spring we were like ‘man, we really want guest vocals on one of these songs.’ We kind of narrowed it down to what we thought would be good and finally we were like ‘“TFW” would sound great with Snarls’ so we just kind of cold DM’d them and they were, fortunately, very excited to do so.

Candy Wife Wears the Pants

Decoding time again. Candy Wife is like a pushover character from The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack?

She’s not a pushover character. In Flapjack she is the sentient—well, presumably sentient—statue that Peppermint Larry, the candy bar owner, is married to

She’s inanimate?

Yeah, she’s inanimate but it very heavily implies that she’s sentient and maybe like all-seeing or all-controlling. I just thought it was funny, “Candy Wife Wears the Pants,” because she wears the pants in whatever type of relationship they have.

And a lot of your songs seem to be about you, or an unknown narrator, struggling through relationships. Are Aaron and Chris good counselors in rehearsal? Do you talk a lot about how you’re feeling?

We do! We do talk about all of our feelings, which is great. And we end all of our Facetimes with ‘I love you,’ which is great. I think every band should do it. If you don’t love your band members what are you doing?

And that was a New Year’s resolution, right? Saying ‘I love you, man’? [paraphrasing lyrics from “Hungover Brunch at Tiffany’s”]

Oh! “Saying ‘I love you, man’ without it being cringey or ill-timed.” If you love your friends, tell your friends you love them.

Fullmetal Crickets

This has big finale written all over it, you’ve got a lot of stuff going on here. But first, how does Fullmetal Alchemist tie into this?

One of the nerdiest lines on the record comes on the bridge section of this song when I sing “I watch you like the brothers Elric, transmuting my chest into a pillow.” I don’t know if you’re familiar with Fullmetal Alchemist. It’s all about magical alchemy, so they can take one substance and transform it into something else. It’s just kind of like a fancy metaphor talking about someone resting their head on your chest like a pillow but through a very nerdy referential way.

And this has the crickets back, so you’ve got samples or ambient sounds, you’ve got lots of guitars, lots of vocals.

Everything but the kitchen sink.

Yeah. You talked about how you want to move in a more progressive direction. Is this maybe a sign of where things are headed potentially for Palette Knife?

Yes and no. I think yes in terms of the sampling platter of all the things we want to add. In some ways I kind of see it as a foil to the title track because it switches to all these A, B, C, and D sections. But in “Ponderosa Snake House” all those transitions are very quick and kind of manic, whereas here they’re all drawn-out and maybe outstay their welcome but purposefully. This song is probably the most challenging on the record in terms of structure.

I think yes in terms of a lot of the technical things we’re doing with the time signatures and the riffs and what not and the more layered songwriting. It’s more of the long-format songwriting I don’t think we’re necessarily chasing after.

It’s not necessarily that every Palette Knife song in the future will be so big and grand.

Yeah, exactly. The reason we kind of did the everything and the kitchen sink and had all these long, drawn-out sections is because we wrote it with the purpose of being the finale song, but I don’t foresee a lot of our songs in the future being super long and drawn-out like this is—not that four minutes is long and drawn-out, but for emo it maybe is a little.

***

Follow Palette Knife on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

By Cameron Carr