Last Friday, Palm came to Boston to kick off their North American tour in support of their second album, Rock Island, sharing the stage with Boston champs (New England) Patriots and tourmates spirit of the beehive.

Though it’s more laid back and melodic than the band’s previous work, Rock Island features some of the most daring experiments with rhythm since the output of Guerilla Toss’ Boston tenure. Where GToss’ métier was once bombing through the no man’s land of jerky time signatures and blunt tempo shifts, Palm moves through metric modulations as breezily as a lesser band’s chord changes. Take “Composite,” which at its climax suspends a single lyric across three or four rhythmic phases. Having played Rock Island twice a day since its release earlier this month, I was excited as much by the record itself as by sheer curiosity for how a band might pull all of this off live.

In contrast to Rock Island’s hyperrealistic, hi res presentation, Palm’s live show was raucous and organic. Where the record skips and stutters like Chicago footwork, the jams were trancelike and groovy. Untethered to pre-programmed midi sequences, the band were prone to noisey improvisation, with rhythm section Hugo and Gerasimos (bass) offering countless takes on songs already packed with myriad perspectives on single motifs. Both on record and on stage, Palm’s deconstructionism poses a fundamental challenge to conventional pop sensibility – once it was “God only knows,” now “God only sees it from both sides.”

I took the high turnout of local regulars as a testament to Boston’s appetite for challenging music in all its forms. Through the line up ran two threads; one with the Pats (along with kindred spirits Sediment Club and Palberta) at the intersection of performance art and noise, and the other with Palm whose commitment to musicianship recalls artists as disparate as Horse Lords and Ryan Power.

If this framework seems like a stretch, I agree that there’s virtually no aesthetic cohesion among New England’s most prominent DIY bands. But then wouldn’t this be the natural countercultural reaction to a most homogenous period of pop music? Within this milieu, your average taste regulator can be forgiven for chafing to think outside of their Wikipedia cross references. It’s certainly easier to assume you’re being fucked with. As if anticipating this presumption of bad faith in leading by example, singer and guitarist Eve offers her own paradoxical mission statement: “My own rules / are always best when broken.”