Parenthetical Prologue
For a long time, Parenthetical Girls existed as a kind of amorphous entity, various helping-hands —some minor celebrity, some shrouded in anonymity— coming and going; the sole constant being one chap named Zac Pennington. An early alliance with Xiu Xiu essentially, easily earmarked Pennington as a variation on the Jamie Stewart theme: the sexually-ambiguous frontman whose musical identity is inseparable from his own.
As their artistic catalyst, it makes sense that, even as they've evolved, Parenthetical Girls are still defined by Pennington: his wavering warble and penchant for domestic drama bringing to mind Marc Almond; his narrative nous as ever-present in the lyrical tales of Entanglements as it was across 2006's sweetly savage Safe as Houses.
But, musically speaking, the Parenthetical Girls heard here bear scant resemblance to those at play through the band's pockmarked past. Having slowly evolved into a crack quartet, the classically-trained members now populating the project have helped Pennington remodel his musical vehicle. And the third PG LP is the showstopping showcase for this new era.
Strike Up the Band
Entanglements is a wholly orchestral work: a set of densely-scored, elaborately-layered mini-symphonies. Pennington's polysyllabic pseudo-falsetto is still the anchor to which it's hitched, but this disc's far removed from the insularity that defined Safe as Houses. With naked ambition, the album draws from an array of orchestral sources —the dissonant-showtune work of Wally Stott on Scott Walker's Scott Three, the hectic cartoonishness of the Raymond Scott Quintette, the candy-colored swirls of Burt Bacharach's Promises, Promises penmanship— and dares to dream of making something so grand, so seemingly corny, so rich with musical contradiction.
The songs zip about with the jaunty jollity of a distant era: strings zinging, woodwinds squawking, timpanis boinging; the devil-may-care accelerando bursts pirouetting with the kind of gay abandon usually reserved for exuberant musicals. In all this spattered-score busyness, there's a strange sense of comedy inherent in every exaggerated instrumental gesture: as if the anthropomorphized instruments of Prokofiev have come home to roost.
Yet, forever running counter to the orchestrated schmaltz is Pennington: his fruity, gender-confused crooning; his thesaurus-leafing lyrics; his perpetual attraction to the bodily and the grotesque. The narrative threads aren't so apparent as they were on Safe as Houses, but repeated listens help stitch its motifs together: Entanglements an LP that, lyrically, buries itself willingly in the moral quandary. As whole, it's a superlative work; a definite, legitimate contender for 2008's best-of lists.
Record Label: Tomlab
Release Date: 9 September 2008
