Posted on: October 1, 2010 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

October 2nd w/ Marnie Stern at Cabaret Juste Pour Rire (Montreal QC)

About Heaven / Hell / Big / Love.

The songs on the EP were formed around ‘Hell, Heaven’, a tune the band started playing a little over a year ago at shows. The idea was to craft 3-4 other additional songs in the studio without any rehearsals or premeditated parts. We also wanted create 4-5 pieces that had no direct thematic connection to one another. While ‘Hell, Heaven’ has me abstractly meandering through the thoughts of a childhood spent in the middle east, ‘Big Love’ invokes a more sarcastic, cheeky side of the band with Louis crooning about an ex-girlfriend who has the ‘look of a man’. ‘Where Is The Sun’ and ‘Tehching Hsieh’ each show a more surreal side of Parlovr’s epic reach: ‘Where Is The Sun’ has a dreamy romantic punch and ‘Tehching Hsieh’ is a twisted bio-tune (biographical tune!?) of an obsure 70s performance artist.

The result is a collection of songs that feel like flipping through cable t.v. channels in a roadside motel while half asleep. It’s an epic meets tongue-in-cheek set of songs, with melodies that contrast quickly from catchy to twisted, and guitars and drums that go from pell mell to streamlined, sometimes several times within song. Even the bass synth can’t settle down into one kind of emotional pattern. It’s all amused chaos from afar, but pretty thick and holistic when listened to up close.

Like Parlovr’s self-titled debut, the EP was recorded with Martin Horn at Digital Bird Studios in Montreal, intermittently while the band found breaks from various tours. A lot of Roland Space Echo was used, as well as an old analog snythesizer called a Yamaha CS-5.

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