the parenthetical girls

Photo from my Parenthetical Girls Flickr set

The Parenthetical Girls (download them from eMusic) are four people from Portland, Oregon, who play fragile, fractured indie pop with clear antecedents in both Xiu Xiu and Bjork. On Friday, they played an excellent Todd P show at Uncle Paulie’s in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

It was a very weird show. Opening were a trio of Japanese hippies (above) whose name I didn’t catch (boring), and playing after the Parenthetical Girls were the Creeping Nobodies, the band I had gone to see, but who were — bummer of bummers — not very good. Great music, but really poor vocals, to where I’d be grooving along happily… until someone started singing. It wasn’t that their voices were bad, it was that they had no relationship to the songs they were playing.

The Parentheticals, however, were great. It was like standing in the middle of a big, broken music box, with the band’s singer, Zak Pennington, bouncing lithely around the weird, open room, smacking a drum stick on the ceilings, walls, tables and anything else solid he could find. The world is his instrument. I shot a brief video clip of one portion I loved, a performance of “Stolen Children,” the last song on their most recent record, Safe As Houses.

I picked up the album from their merch table last night, and I highly recommend it. I’ve really been enjoying it all day, especially “Stolen Children” and “I Was the Dancer.” Download it from eMusic, or pick it up from them — people, you should always buy things from merch tables! — at one of their remaining tour dates:

Sat, April 7th – Baltimore – Hole In the Wall Cabaret
Sun, April 8th – Cincinnati – Skull Lab
Mon, April 9th – Bloomington, IN – Cinemat
Tues, April 10th – St. Louis – LempArts
Wed, April 11th – Champaign, IL – Courtyard Cafe
Thu, April 12th – Lincoln, Nebraska – House Show
Fri, April 13th – Denver, Colorado – Hi Dive
Sun, April 15th – Boise, Idaho – V.A.C.