Let us remind us of the fey and amazing Parenthetical Girls, who are slowly releasing a set of five EPs that will combine to form their next album like a big gender-ambiguous Voltron. You might remember how their last album, Entanglements, single-handedly restored my faith in music. And poetry -- if you printed the lyrics to this small set of dramatic monologues, with their puns and tiny rhymes and sexy, sexy sibilance, and released it as a tiny chapbook telling their single, morally ambiguous story, not only would it be better than 99% of the poetry books out there, I might actually pay for it.
The first song off Privilege Pt I is the pleasingly grating "Evelyn McHale" which made no sense until I googled Evelyn McHale to find beautiful and desperately lonely picture above. Gone are the lush arrangements of Entanglements, this is a return to basics, with the happy morbidity right on display in the first lines:
When you were crippled by that car
when we were martyred monthly and scarred
by the way that we are
(Note how the pronoun changes. With the Girls the question is always 'Who is speaking?')
The Girls have always portrayed suicide as a glorious mess, almost like a famed death-in-battle for the ancients (in that gone are always better off than the surviving). And what could be a more beautiful suicide than Evelyn McHale, who went up the world's most famous landmark and came down on a limo.
Parenthetical Girls - Evelyn McHale
I'd like to note that earlier this year the Girls made very nearly the best/strangest/creepiest Smiths cover ever, which I liked so much I made it my ringtone. Thankfully nobody calls me, or I'd be continuously freaked out.
Parenthetical Girls - Handsome Devil
