Parenthetical Girls

Turning Clichés Into Fanfare

By Kyle Lemmon

Photos by Sarah Meadows and Patrick Kehoe

Stephen Fry once wrote, “It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then, like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.” Among Fry’s many pursuits was being a self-deprecating journalist, a profession that singer and lyricist Zac Pennington shares. Pennington was the music editor for the Portland Mercury for just under two years; before that, he worked as the calendar editor/staff writer at The Stranger. He now works in various administrative temp positions in between tours.

Even into the present, Pennington believes he embodies the long-standing cliché that music journalists are failed musicians whose writing is engorged by jealously. Pennington accepts that foible with a bit of candid self-flagellation. “When I was younger,” he says, “I tried virtually every angle I could imagine to be intimately involved with music, save actually playing music. Music journalism was one of the last stops on a long road of tangential involvement with music, and though I wasn’t a particularly good journalist, I was very opinionated. And I made a lot of enemies very quickly.” Though he thought it a noble profession, Pennington soon grew wary of the “parasitic quality inherent in criticism” and ironically began pursuing music in his hometown of Everett, Wash. From the failed milling town, he journeyed to Seattle and then finally Portland. And the songs moved with him.

Parenthetical Girls, or (((GRRRLS))) as their self-titled 2004 debut reads, is an experimental-pop band with the acerbic bite of a punk outfit. That first album was an insular musical cocoon swirling with indie and pop influences that ranged from Brian Eno (the band’s original name was a nod to Eno’s “Swastika Girls”) to Phil Spector’s well, spectre. Pennington notes that the eventual name change from Swastika Girls was purely practical: “No one in Seattle would book us at the time.”

Running contrary to the inward parenthetical, the Portland band featured a revolving-door studio and live lineup. It currently presents itself as a quartet, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Matthew Carlson (keyboard, percussion, guitar), Eddy Crichton (percussion, keyboard), Rachael Jensen (violin, percussion, keyboard, vocals) and Pennington singing above the lurching tumult. Former (((GRRRLS)))’s members and Dead Science mates Sam Mickens (guitar) and Jherek Bischoff (bass) sometimes lend their services in the studio as well.

While Pennington may lack musical ability, he makes up for it in his facility to network with some of the most cherished avant-garde musicians working today. His friendly acquaintances with Bischoff and Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart landed him the (((GRRRLS))) debut, released on his “vanity label” Slender Means Society, on which he’s subsequently released material from PWRFL Power, The Dead Science, Xiu Xiu, Grouper, The Blow and Lucky Dragons, among others.

Pennington keeps Slender close to the chest but knows the realities of running an indie in today’s economy. “For an artist, there are really only two benefits of running a small label: complete, totalitarian control over your product and 100% profit on wares sold,” he says. “The myriad disadvantages generally outweigh the modest positives that such control presents. This disparity is especially felt in recent years, as it’s nearly impossible for a label at the level of Slender Means Society to just break even on its releases.”

To combat those diminishing returns, the (((GRRRLS)))’s frontman helped steer an impressive sophomore album, 2006’s Safe As Houses. Written and recorded with Bischoff and Mickens in “enclosed places dotting the Northwest,” the album’s lyrical center rests in the connotative violence of postmodern motherhood, monstrous adolescence and the nature of femininity; Gender Studies aficionados surely had a ball parsing it out.

Fast-forwarding to this month’s release of Entanglements, (((GRRRLS))) welcome a joint release with Germany’s Tomlab Records and one of their most vibrant albums to date. Despite the carnival-like instrumentation, the lyrical matter has remained knotted around a cerebral core. The quasi-title track “Entanglement” was originally titled “America;” Pennington drolly describes the former title as “self-evident.” The choice for Jensen to sing the oft-covered “Windmills of Your Mind” skirts cliché by flourishing in Pennington’s slowly gestating central metaphor of imprecise love. Pennington notes that even among the new expansive sounds of Rhodes Bass, traditional rockers like “Young Eucharists” were recorded in the backseat of a 1996 Geo Prizm.

Pennington started working on Entanglements before Safe As Houses, but eventually put the project on hiatus when he realized his canvas far exceeded his palette. “The original idea was to write an MGM musical using particular phenomena in quantum mechanics as a metaphor for the equally abstract notions of physical and so-called spiritual connections,” he explains.

With the formation of its current lineup – particularly the addition of the compositionally educated Carlson – the band started talking about the idea of resuscitating Pennington’s old ideas and pouring them into a less autobiographical mold. “Without being too specific, I wanted to write about the disparity between love and lust, the obsessive places where they intersect one another and the unspoken ambiguities between consent and exploitation,” says Pennington. “So basically, I wanted to write about what every rock band in the history of the world has already written well into the ground.”

The sound of the record is immediately striking and full of Technicolor textures devoid of rock’s standard guitar. Despite the fact the album boasts 100 audio tracks, the band’s leader plays no instruments on Entanglements. “I harp on this idea a lot – to the point that most of my bandmates just roll their eyes now,” Pennington says. “I’m not technically proficient at even the most rudimentary instruments ... I’m a pretty marginal clapper ... None of this is a point of pride or false modesty or anything, just simple fact.” Free to avoid what he doesn’t do best, Pennington’s band ably supports him on tracks that resemble a madcap, looking-glass pop world, eerily similar to the 1960s music of the Brill Building songwriting assemblage who wrote such pop hits as “Be My Baby,” “Then He Kissed Me,” and “Da Doo Ron Ron.”

That’s perfectly apt for many songs, but certainly true for the kaleidoscopic single, “A Song For Ellie Greenwich.” Piano, horns, woodwinds and strings (and the only guitar on the album) pan back and forth and jolt to a stop if you listen to it with headphones – a touch Pennington is proud of. “I realized recently that I’ve for a long time silently thought of myself as a ‘really excellent panner,’ which of course is totally absurd and embarrassing,” he says.

Where Pennington has found a place absconded among his new band, (((GRRRLS))) continue to play alongside likeminded by disparate sounding musicians like Au, The Dead Science and Xiu Xiu. Pennington consigns the comparisons to his former profession but he revels in the experimental pop community’s camaraderie.

“In the most literal sense possible, they’ve all, to varying extents, been involved in the physical production of our recordings,” says Pennington. “Beyond direct involvement though, I think they all approach music from an extremely different perspective than Parenthetical Girls. I deeply admire all three of those groups and we pale to them in so many ways.” Pennington’s growing sense of milieu in the musical community certainly feeds off his evergreen diffidence, whether he lives up to his cliché or renders it silent.

www.myspace.com/parentheticalgirlsband