Parenthetical Girls. Entanglements

[September 3rd, 2008]

[CHAMBER POP] Most musicians tend to tuck their influences in their hip pockets, making reference in their original material to these sonic treats they are keeping from view. Some, though, don’t mind being quite blatant about it.

Take, for example, “Song for Elle Greenwich,” the lead single from the new Parenthetical Girls album, Entanglements. Itself an homage to the magisterial work of Burt Bacharach, the song swoops into the chorus with a musical and melodic hook lifted directly from the ’70s AM pop standard “Close to You.”

It’s a cheeky move on the part of this band of Portlanders, but one that speaks blatantly to the overall referential nature of the whole album. Even if the “Close to You” riff weren’t so recognizable, both Zac Pennington and Matthew Carlson, the masterminds behind the group, are very upfront about pulling in bits and pieces of other songs to construct the music on the new album.

“One of the things we were talking about a lot was the particular arrangements of Smile [the infamous lost Beach Boys album],” says Pennington. “They would just record elements and bits of songs, and try to place them elsewhere in other songs. We were trying to make a similar puzzle that we could try to use pieces from.”

To that end, Carlson, a former composition student, put together “a chart of melodic fragments and what key they were in and tried to figure out ways to move them to other songs.”

The process sounds positively laborious, but the result is a seamless chamber-pop record, bristling with strings, horns and woodwinds, topped with Pennington’s wavering vocals. Even Carlson says that he is amazed how “live it sounds considering how totally constructed it was.” He points to the meticulous editing that engineer Jherek Bischoff did to piece together different good, but not great, takes of a particular part into one spotless line.

In spite of the band’s obvious relief at being able to have finished the album, don’t expect it to take the easy route for future efforts. Pennington says he is already committed to starting completely from scratch next time around. “I would rather be working in a way that was more project-based, and make each project be pretty specific, and pushing it in a direction that was different from the previous work,” he says. “Less like a trajectory and more like a sidestep.”