PARENTHETICAL GIRLS – safe as houses

(CD, Acuarela Discos)

Always counted among the kind of music hyped between Animal Collective and Devandra Banhart, Zac Pennington’s Parenthetical Girls are actually something completely different, but something that goes mostly unnoticed. And that is pop. Pure, subconscious, straight from the belly popmusic that spits out chewed experiences and impressions from overall society down to the microscopic personal developments and traumatas of childhood and puberty. Converted, encrypted and miraculous images and visions of the artist’s life and mind but always filtered through harmonies and melodies. The connection to Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu) therefore makes a lot more sense than to that of the freak folk variety. Freak Folk, my goodness! Okay, I need to insert a paragraph on this here: If you are not interested in some directionless rant about the evils of music journalism please jump past the following paragraph.

The term freak folk does nothing to me. I find it very unsympathetic, useless and even wrong. Like the kind of things typical music journalists would jump on to fill pages and pages with best of lists and album highlights that contain a lot of pictures, names and dates but no valuable information whatsoever. Like those “best 100 records of all time” or “100 best songs by Bob Dylan” lists, whose fickle fascination I also can’t get away from, but which always leave me wondering about the reasons that they are here for. After all, “Nevermind” isn’t that good a record musically, right? I can also see the intrigue of Morrison Hotel or Jailbreaker or Daydream Nation, but to say this is number 3 or 5 or 27, who can really do that? I don’t like music journalism nor journalists, maybe I should stop writing about them. A freshly baked fruitcake (plums are ripe these weeks, soon apples will be ready) is way more interesting than labels like these. So, back to the review.

The urban twentysomething is a lonely person. Despite all the cool clubs and clubbings, the fashionable sneakers and army jackets, despite a mobile phone filled with numbers of other urban twentysomethings and an e-mail contact database that is full of even more people, it seems hard to get past the codas being formed by numbers, nicknames and adresses to the real person. This kind of loneliness is cold and empty and hard to get over. One way to get over it is to find a special someone, form a family and then fall into the basic form of living that is being sanctified by all society. This kind of approval from all sides fills the emptiness with positive stimulation. Yes, that is the shallow and superficial way out, but it is still better than manic shopping and an endless run of meaningless sex. (Though I am not gonna put down consumerism and sex-addiction as something downright bad – every kind of addiction has its good sides as well.) Another way is to confront the emptiness, the traumatas and the psychosis directly in a creative way. Painting and songwriting are favourable forms.

This was the fundament that the Parenthetical’s first record set off from. “Safe as houses” takes a new turn and tries to twist the trauma into a different perspective, various different perspective’s to be honest. Families are even more complicated, bleak, desperate and filled with disappointments and traumatas. The sexless figures on the cover and inside cover are results of the lovelessness of the modern family upbringing, the loss of connection between generations and the mass of traumatas and problems that might arise in a post-war family in the second to third generation. The generation that seemingly has everything it might desire and finds out the most important things have been lost on the way.

Musically, if you have to take proper associations The Decemberists are close by because of the similarity of Zac Pennington’s and Colin Meloy’s singing voice, but with that high pitched, sometimes falsetto and significant quiver singing voice that marks the closeness of the issues being sung about as opposed to the Decemberist’s distinctively distanced narrative and fictional approach to music. The melodies are grand and the arrangements too, even within the narrow scope of this one step beyong homerecording production. Guitars sound like organs and the glockenspiel begins and ends the album. The slow pace drags like dreams of lost love before the first real love ever happened. There are stillborn children, griefing family members, loss and abandonment poured into the fitting songwriting. There are ecstatic highpoints and culminations in the music and slowly and lowly winding roads, hills, mountains, seasides and one or two volcanoes (at least from far). There is the almost radio friendly “The weight she fell under” whose melody plays with an old american marching song. There is so much more for anyone to discover, that takes even longer to write about. Every spin will spit out something new. And all of that is being layed out before the listener with conviction, seriousness and brave honesty.