Photo via Facebook / Yum Yum Cult
If Yum Yum Cult’s Palmer Shah had to attribute one reason as to why he writes music, it would be that he strives to be a musician that would impress his younger self.
It makes sense then that Yum Yum Cult, a band that has been performing for about three years now, would only have two songs in its discography—Shah is extremely picky about what he writes and releases. “I’ll sit on something for years until I’m ready to release it,” Shah says.
But he admits that since the pandemic hit and postponed the release of Yum Yum Cult’s debut album It Kills Me, It Really Does, he’s become less picky and less of a perfectionist. That doesn’t mean that any quality of musicianship has been sacrificed on the band’s third single, “If Talk’s All It Is,” out now on Spotify and Soundcloud.
Recorded partly at Silver City Studios and partly at bassist Sean Anderson’s home studio, “If Talk’s All It Is” sees the band simmering into a boil, putting Shah’s vocals at the forefront as he tells the story of a complicated relationship.
“I got the idea (for the song) from a friend who came to me and said a long-time friend of theirs recently started getting together romantically and she was trying to figure out how to handle that,” Shah says. “So, it’s about navigating a personal friendship-turned-relationship and seeing where it goes from there.”
As chorus-soaked chords flesh out the framework of the song, Shah’s vocals dance from a soothing stream-of-consciousness confession to a spoken word break before once again building up the intensity in the final moments of the track. It covers all of the bases of how one might assess a friendship blossoming into a relationship—at times there’s passion and lust, but that thought might quickly change over to doubt and regret. Lyrics like “Where does your friendship lie when your skin is against his” and “Why’s he avoiding looking into your eyes” paint the picture of someone trying to wrap their head around a night that felt simultaneous right and wrong.
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“Thematically, I try to compare it to the flow of water—like a calm river hitting a waterfall,” Shah says. “The uncertainty back to the slow and steady calm—I try to incorporate that both lyrically and musically.”
“If Talk’s All It Is” is the final single that Yum Yum Cult plans on revealing to the public before the rescheduled release of It Kills Me, It Really Does this fall. The album will contain about eight or nine songs, and Shah appears to be eager to let Milwaukee hear them—shedding his usual pickiness.
“At this point we’ve been sitting on these songs for so long and now we can get back to them with fresh ears,” Shah says.
And if you want more Yum Yum Cult but can’t wait until the fall, the band’s keyboard player Myles Coyne has a solo single out and bassist Anderson’s project Supertentacles just released a song as well.
