Fated to Pretend

The story of the Parenthetical Girls begins somewhat inauspiciously,
in Everett, Washington. It’s a place that bandleader Zac Pennington
describes as a “failed mill town,” before noting (parenthetically) that
it is “considerably less romantic than that manipulative phrasing is
meant to suggest.”

Pennington got out as soon as he could, moving to Seattle in the
early ’00s. There, he turned Swastika Girls, his home-recording project
begun in Everett with childhood friend Jeremy Cooper, into a workable,
if still painfully raw, live band, eventually rechristening it
Parenthetical Girls; he launched a monthly event, Slender Means
Society, which eventually developed into a small record label; he wore
a lot of women’s blouses and velveteen jackets. He left Seattle for
Portland in late 2003, throwing himself a going-away party styled as a
funeral, for which he spent the entire night lying dead silent inside a
coffin, coming alive to bid the crowd farewell via a pre-recorded video
projected between bands.

Pennington also wrote for the Seattle’s The Stranger and then
the Mercury, and rereading his old works of music criticism, one
can see Pennington shaping himself.

Pennington has invented himself over the years as an effete
indie-rock fop, a semi-androgynous art snob with eventually realized
pretensions to scene-shaking. His lyrics are as wordy and precious as
anything his editors ever let into print, and his band’s music walks a
tightrope between retro pop classicism and experimental outbursts.

Parenthetical Girls’ first two albums, 2004’s (((GRRRLS))) and 2006’s Safe as Houses, are to varying, disquieting degrees
as autobiographical as they are imaginative. Each of these albums
feature, for their cover art, drawings of Pennington as identical
pre-pubescent boy/girl twins. On the first album, these twins are in
their underwear about to hold hands; on the second, they’re naked in
bed, looking respectively terrified and titillated, poised on the verge
of fucking a mirror’s reflection of himself.

Asked if he’s consciously cultivated an exaggerated version of
himself, Pennington subtly reframes the question: “Do you mean, ‘Are
you trying to seem like an asshole, or are you really that much of an
asshole?'”

And then he answers: “I guess I don’t really know anymore, to be
honest. I don’t really think of Parenthetical Girls as just some
element of a greater scheme of self-aggrandizement. If it were, the
whole thing would be a lot more depressing than it already is,
considering the farm leagues within which we operate. I think people
tend to approach us with a certain degree of cynicism—to think
that what we do is somehow disingenuous, or some kind of put-on. And
that’s valid—no one in the band is particularly concerned with up
keeping some standard of ‘authenticity’ or whatever,” he says.

“But, I mean, fuck it: I do like snobby shit,” Pennington continues.
“And I do admire a lot of affected, self-aggrandizing pop musicians.
And I do choose to sing like a lady sometimes. All of these things tend
to lend themselves to a certain level of conscious cultivation.”

Whether or not one finds fault in Pennington’s aesthetics or
contrivances, his strategies have paid off most handsomely on
Parenthetical Girls’ latest album, Entanglements. For one thing,
the album’s songwriting marks a significant step forward for
Pennington, trading distorted autobiographical shocks for a loose
album-length narrative arc of a presumably more fictional bent, which
untangles a love affair at least four years on, between two actors
whose genders aren’t always clear and whose ages are 21 and 10 at the
affair’s inception. The pedophilic gross-out factor is somewhat
ameliorated by Pennington’s fascination with permanently suspended
adolescence, such that the 14- and 25-year-old lovers could generously
be seen as the same. Or perhaps the album’s interest in quantum physics
(e.g., the Jeanette Winterson-referencing “Gut Symmetries”) allows for
some kind of temporal relativism.

Most significantly, Entanglements sounds simply gorgeous,
full of grand orchestral gestures and tenacious pop hooks, everything
just right in its proper place. The album is the first recorded with
Parenthetical Girls as a full band, rounded out by Eddy Crichton,
Rachael Jensen, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Carlson. Pianos,
xylophones, strings, woodwinds, harps, and percussion turn from jaunty
and carefree flights to maudlin and ominous dirges from one song or
verse to the next, from the cartoonishly drunken oompah of
“Unmentionables” to the ascendant bridge of “The Former” (“you strive
for happiness, I guess…”).

Entanglements is a stunning, complicated album, and a
rewarding realization of everything Pennington’s been working toward
over the years. One only wonders what he’ll make of himself next.