The Parlor

Poke around the website for Altamont, N.Y. act the Parlor, and you’ll find all the markers of a post-millennial artisanal indie-folk act: dainty illustrated album art, pastoral images of band lynchpins Eric Krans and Jen O’Connor sitting among oversized flowers with acoustic guitars, a bio that mentions sharing past bills with the Lumineers and Willy Mason, and a debut album that splits the difference between the Arcade Fire’s communal chorales and Animal Collective’s clap-happy euphoria.

But all those signifiers feel instantly outmoded upon listening to the band’s upcoming sophomore release, Wahzu Wahzu. Sprinkled with Catskills-scraped pixie dust by producer Anthony Molina (of upstate icons Mercury Rev), the album sees the Parlor stoking their campfire into a forest-scorching disco inferno, staking out their dancefloor on backwoods dirt and using the stars above as their LED rig. "The Surgeon’s Knife" is the album’s sparkling, mirror-ball centerpiece: with its clipped acoustic groove, O’Connor’s luminous coo, and a 4/4 beat that blurs the line between a dusty-boot stomp and bass-bin thump, the song is a dream-sequence rendering of the Daft Punk MTV Unplugged special that never happened in 2001. When O’Connor sings, "we’re feeling like dancing," it’s both an invitation to join her rural rave, and a farewell to the Parlor’s sepia-toned past.

The Parlor: "The Surgeon's Knife" (via SoundCloud) - Pitchfork Media

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part of our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJ’s think you should hear. Today’s song, featured on the Afternoon Show with Kevin Cole, is “The Surgeon’s Knife” by The Parlor from the 2015 album Wahzu Wahzu, on B3nson.

The Parlor – The Surgeon’s Knife (MP3)
Step into The Parlor, and you’ll find this New York-based act bring a DFA Records-dance groove to their homespun trance-folk sound. This husband-and-wife duo of Eric Krans and Jen O’Connor did indeed write these songs in a parlor, of their 19th century haunted farmhouse. With Mercury Rev’s Anthony Molina as producer, they’ve taken a turn from the folksy sound of previous releases, turning to artists like Michael Jackson, The Go-Go’s, and Talking Heads for inspiration. Today’s Song of the Day has been called “campfire disco.” In an interview with The Wild Honey Pie, O’Connor says, “We like that. It’s probably one of the happiest sounding songs we’ve ever written, but we were writing this song (and most of the songs on our new record Wahzu Wahzu) when we were experiencing a lot of loss and a lot of stress. There’s a point where your body won’t allow itself to experience any more trauma and the only way to feel alive is to be joyful. Allowing yourself to sing and to dance is the fastest way to shake yourself out of a painful situation… but of course, there are still the reminders that life isn’t normal.”

No shows on the horizon yet for 2016, but keep watch on their Twitter and Facebook. In the meantime, check out this video for today’s Song of the Day. O’Connor explains, “For Eric’s birthday, we threw a party and shot this music video. We have a lot of incredibly talented friends who took part and made it possible. The video was filmed with the help of our friends at The Foundry for Art Design + Culture and stars a lot of awesome people from the creative community here in Upstate New York.” - KEXP

There’s no doubt that The Parlor have an almost criminally happy and catchy song with “The Surgeon’s Knife.” It’s been described as “campfire disco” with it’s mix of earnest guitar and vocals with an obvious dance beat, and this song truly drives that home. The video for the track revels in silliness and joy, with a simple video that seems to actually be in front of a campfire and never cuts from the jigging band. Singer Jen O’Connor says of the song:

“We’ve heard this song described as “Campfire Disco.” We like that. It’s probably one of the happiest sounding songs we’ve ever written, but we were writing this song (and most of the songs on our new record Wahzu Wahzu) when we were experiencing a lot of loss and a lot of stress. There’s a point where your body won’t allow itself to experience any more trauma and the only way to feel alive is to be joyful. Allowing yourself to sing and to dance is the fastest way to shake yourself out of a painful situation… but of course, there are still the reminders that life isn’t normal.

If the rug is too heavy just keep yourself steady and take out the surgeon’s knife -slice it up lengthwise” is a direct invitation to literally cut a rug, with the most extreme and dramatic tool possible. We were trying to write something that made us happy, because that was what we needed. And sometimes it ends up creating happiness in others, which is even better. For Eric’s (Krans, co-member of The Parlor) birthday we threw a party and shot this music video. We have a lot of incredibly talented friends who took part and made it possible. The video was filmed with the help of our friends at The Foundry for Art Design + Culture and stars a lot of awesome people from the creative community here in Upstate NY.”

Check out the video above and get ready to start your Friday off dancing. - The Wild Honey Pie

Hailing from upstate New York, the Parlor excel at the dreamier, more psychedelic side of indie rock and indie folk, channeling the likes of Mercury Rev and Animal Collective yet bringing their own personalities into the music also. Band masterminds Eric Krans and Jen O’Connor create a gentle, otherworldly sound on “Wishes in the Sheets”, from their forthcoming new album Wahzu Wahzu. Which so happens to have been mastered by Mercury Rev member Anthony Molina.

“‘Wishes in the Sheets’ is intended to emulate the moment when an idea first comes into being,” the pair says. “We sing in unison whisper—representing the moment when thoughts and creations are not yet fully formed, when ideas are wishes. Overlapping guitars, like waves of thought, create a Doppler effect. It’s the feeling of simultaneously being submerged underwater surrounded by inspiration, while also feeling it receding away from you. All things in their moment of conception are fragile and fleeting. Wishes are the nets we use to capture them in our hearts. ‘Wishes in the Sheets’ is a song about the two of us trying desperately to create together—in life, in love, in art—while death and doubt threaten our dreams. As a human race we are predisposed to not give up. Wishing is the beginning.” - PopMatters

Upon first listen, The Parlor's latest album Wahzu Wahzu is a fairly enigmatic piece of music. At any given point, it lies at intersections of pop, electronic, world, rock, folk, and even jazz—influences so broad as to make their confluence inscrutable, particularly to one as unhealthily obsessed with genre classification as myself. But somehow, despite being eclectic to a degree that would make Blitzen Trapper blush, it works.
Central to understanding why it works, though, is getting to know the people behind the music. While they've grown into a substantial group in recent years, occasionally touring with as many as nine members, The Parlor's main creative force is wife-and-husband duo Jen O'Connor and Eric Krans.

After spending a good deal of time studying sustainable agriculture abroad in Thailand and New Zealand, the couple took up residence at O'Connor's family estate in upstate New York and began the process of turning it back into a working farm. Their instruments and recording equipment took up residence in the parlor of their "haunted" farmhouse, and the band has called that room its home ever since—hence the name.

As a result of the somewhat unconventional path they've taken, Krans and O'Connor bring an astonishingly diverse set of inspirations to their music. The album opener, "I Saw You in the Truth," could easily feature in a lineup of future-soul acts; "Star Chart" sounds like early-2000's R&B; "You Are You Were You Can" is a cloud-parting chamber-pop track with elements reminiscent of late-model Radiohead; "Wahzu Wahzu" is beachy garage rock through and through, punctuated with pizzicato double bass; "The Surgeon's Knife" is a masterfully catchy piece of contemporary indie dance pop; "Theme from Wahzu" is a jazzy lounge interlude; "Wishes in the Sheets" rounds things out with a pensive, melancholy guitar riff for driving alone at night.

Taken as individual tracks, it can be hard to see how this menagerie fits together, but the key is in the execution. Though it meanders from genre to genre, Wahzu Wahzu manages to maintain a consistent aesthetic throughout. The transitions never feel overly abrupt, even when they would seem inevitably so on paper.

That cohesiveness likely stems from the band's overall structure. The Parlor isn't a group that's only together when they can afford to rent studio time—music is integral to Krans and O'Connor's Cloud Cult-esque, pan-artistic lifestyle on their farm. There's a warmth and celebratory playfulness to their sound that can only come from people who take great joy in the acts of creating, improvising, and exploring untrod musical territory, and Wahzu Wahzu is a truly captivating album as a result. Their unpretentious exuberance ensures that it's likely to remain just that for a long time to come. - ThrdCoast

NY-based Electro-folk/art-pop duo, The Parlor (comprised of Eric Krans and Jen O-Connor,) are releasing their sophomore full-length Wahzu Wahzu out today on B3nson, following up their buzzy single release “The Surgeon’s Knife” which came out earlier this year, peaking interest for its melding of glittery rhythms and bossanova melodic trappings. While the band’s debut album Our Day in the Sun placed them solidly in the folk category, they were forced to tread into various electronic realms in order to successfully perform the songs live. As a result their sound began to evolve, taking on trance and world music influences, incorporating acoustic and electronic drums, upright bass and a dizzying array of instruments spanning the entire sonic spectrum. The result of their evolution into the brave new world of electronic music, is Wahzu Whazu, a self-described epiphany unto itself. Of the album, the band says that “it was meant to be a dark, but meaningless candy-pop album. It was supposed to be all syrup and fluorescent. Instead, Wahzu Wahzu became a subconscious philosophic exploration into the act of creation: of death, hope, and dancing.”
The album opens with the dreamy, hopeful ambient, “I Saw You In The Truth” – both stylistically implacable and familiar all the same, combining fluttery vocals, soothing xylophone and glitchy synth. Somewhere in the distance an electronic drum beat comes in right before the song disintegrates into a tenor sax solo, so ethereal that I could’ve sworn it were a wind instrument until I was sadly corrected by a colleague. More of an introduction to the album than an actual song, it perfectly encompasses the projects direction and leaves us wanting. What follows in the eleven tracks to come does not disappoint. Standouts include the irresistibly groovy “Star Chart”, that hooks you on O-Connor’s song-bird-esque vocal style that floats atop the song’s pulsating bass line and disco electric guitar riffs (funnily, I was just bemoaning with a friend of mine, the lack of a true disco resurgence when this album fell into my lap as if on cue.) “You Are You Were You Can,” a personal favorite, leaps out off the track listing by virtue of the first few opening measures which depart from the band’s standard sound, opting for plucky acoustic guitar and an acoustic bass line anchored in baroque. Before you know what’s hitting you, however, an inspiring, ecstatic snare rhythm comes in that relaxes and raises the pulse simultaneously. The track soon evolves into a vocal duet between Krans and O-Connor that showcases just how complementary the two are musically. The album’s title track is another departure from their signature style, traipsing delicately into the depths of restless, experimental psychedelia or even no wave – perhaps an indication of the direction they could be heading in as a project. Though catchy, I find “Wahzu Wahzu” a bit distracting from the flow of the album as a whole, as its so markedly different from their core aesthetic. “Vampire Boys” is another favorite, showcasing a masterful sax line that feels as if it were born to accompany O-Connor’s vocals, whispery and urgent yet playful at the same time. Wrapping up the album is an absolutely stunning mid tempo jam, “Wishes In The Sheets” – the perfect kiss off to the listener. Combining a soothing bass line with driving electronic drums and glitchy guitar, while the duo sing over in unison, creating a song you can chill to or dance to depending on the mood.
All in all Wahzu Wahzu manages to achieve what most albums can’t these days, which is an actual opus of work that tells a story – twelve tracks that flow in and out of one another, all distinct yet seamlessly familial and integral. These days full-lengths tend to feel necessarily disaggregated in the era of the single, and the music industry’s compulsive obsession with the track-by-track release. Wahzu Wahzu defies this convention entirely and still manages to deliver a whole slew of “hits.” It has already solidified a spot on our year-end list.
Listen to Wahzu Wahzu in its entirety below: - Audio Femme

What: When their debut album, Our Day in the Sun, drops on April 7th, New York duo The Parlor will introduce the world to what they’re calling trance-folk pop. The video for their new single, “You’re in My Eye”, is spliced from 8mm film of band-member Jen O’Connor’s grandparents, discovered in the “haunted 19th century farmhouse” from which the band derives its name. O’Connor also made the clip. - Consequence of Sound

We highly recommend watching this film if you haven't already seen it:

http://watch.thebatterymovie.com/

Our music is featured throughout. - The Battery Film Soundtrack

Extract:
The parlor itself is a “museum of eras,” a storehouse of family furniture and ephemera that Krans and O’Connor have been slowly unpacking and exploring ever since they assumed the role of the house’s caretakers and curators. On the wall, there’s an enormous mirror that once hung in a train station and Krans describes as “a portal to another universe,” but the room itself is the real portal. When the house was a working funeral home, this was the room where the bodies were displayed. Both O’Connor’s great grandmother and great grandfather had their services there.

“Growing up as a kid and coming to visit my grandparents here, that was definitely the most terrifying room,” O’Connor says.

In the ’60s, the family dramatically altered the house and land. In an attempt toward modernity, her grandparents tucked away the heirloom furniture, put in shag carpets, air conditioning and drop ceilings, and pulled out almost everything growing other than grass. This is when the hauntings started.

“There’s something that’s deciding things and it’s noticeable to us,” O’Connor says of the parlor. It has the power to both repel certain elements and attract others. When Krans and O’Connor moved in, the first thing they did was open the space up, tear out the carpets, bring back the old furniture and restore the space to how it must have looked around the time of the Depression. One of the most important additions was music. Only then did the haunting begin to subside.

“There’s something about listening to old music that makes the parlor feel normal,” says Krans, “but as soon as you put on something fresh or recent, like Radiohead or Animal Collective, it doesn’t feel right to be listening to it in this room. You almost have to blast it through the house and it sounds better in the kitchen.”

“It almost sounds like the room is rejecting that music,” O’Connor explains. Instead, the parlor prefers gypsy jazz and Christmas music (especially the Motown variety), hand-picking Animal Collective’s “Winter’s Love” and Radiohead’s “Life in a Glasshouse” as permissible exceptions.

“So it ends up informing what we play,” says Krans. The result is a brand of music forged by contemporary methods but built from organic, acoustic, folk-based textures. It’s the sonic corollary to what the couple is bringing to their land, an artisanal reimagining of an antique dream. - Metroland

(The Parlor is formerly known as We are Jeneric) I’ve seen this Albany band (We are Jeneric) before, but they really blew me away. The band is a showcase for the talents of Jen O’Connor and Eric Krans, and the last time I saw We Are Jeneric, I think it was just the two of them on stage. At Rest Fest, they had a full band backing them, and it gave their whisper-to-a-scream indie-folk songs unexpected edge and richness. The band’s lyrics were magical, haunting and surreal, while their music was extremely catchy, ultimately inspiring people to get on their feet and dance. We Are Jeneric were pretty much the highlight of the night; after watching them I thought, “Really, who needs national bands?” - Schenectady Gazette