Parcels’ unfailingly ambitious and original double album may often be just as irresistibly funky as their debut, but it’s also a huge step forward for the band with its daring genre experimentation and philosophical lyricism. It’s a shame that with such grand aims, there were bound to be a few misfires amongst the extensive tracklist.
“It’s a bit like a good bath,” my dad told me of the latest release from Aussie-German funk-pop band Parcels a few days after my second failed attempt to put together a satisfactory opening paragraph for this post. “You have to wallow in it,” he assured me. “You can’t rush it.”
Even though my three week delay in reviewing the album is more due to my limited free time than the nature of the music itself, he has a point. Unlike their groovy (if a little repetitive) debut album, Day/Night demands full attention throughout its meaty 23-song, 100-minute runtime. In fact, it’s not just one album but two sister albums with their own recognisable sets of openers and closers and intriguing parallel themes of lightness and darkness. To listen to it in full is to immerse yourself in a world (or rather, two worlds) of shifting pop chord progressions, sticky bass lines and many, many hooks.
Over the last two years Day/Night has been a labour of love for the endearing five best friends, who recorded both albums during a residency at Le Cigale studios in Paris. The intensity of such close contact is clear not only in the rock solid musicianship on display but the sweetly harmonised group vocals, which are as pristine and finely tuned as ever in five-part falsetto glory to an almost miraculous level of perfection. The obvious strong friendships within the band have also helped powered Parcels’ formidable reputation as a live band. It’s true that whilst moments of Day/Night are spectacular, to see Parcels live is to see them at their scintillating, world-beating best.
Free is complete with multiple piano glissandos, luscious strings and one of the most engaging cowbell performances you’ll hear all year
As I’ve come to expect from the band, the general approach from the self-titled debut largely remained for Day/Night: find a good groove and use it for all it’s worth. Where five minute takes of the same looping four-chord sequence would (and should) be shunned by critics of any chart-topping pop artist, the simple quality of their loops are what makes Parcels the exception to the rule. Nowhere is this more true than on Free, a stunning, sunshine-fueled introduction to Day. As foreshadowed by last year’s fantastic live album, 2021 is the year of the acoustic piano as far as Parcels fans are concerned, and Free serves as a grand inaugural outing for a plucky little upright which is treated to one of Patrick Hetherington’s best riffs to date. The song builds and builds, with Toto Serret excruiciatingly holding back on the all important snare backbeat before another magical build from almost nothing, complete with multiple piano glissandos, luscious strings and one of the most engaging cowbell performances you’ll hear all year. Expect to see this one rank very highly indeed when I come to look back at Undertone‘s best songs of 2021 next month.
Day proves to be the more single-heavy – and in my opinion, slightly better – of the two albums. The piano makes a prominent return for the irrestibile cascading groove on Comingback, a song about rediscovering yourself in the wake of the pandemic. Lyrically, its Parcels at their most touchingly sincere. “If anyone gives a damn, I want you to know I’m here / You’re never alone,” Noah Hill sings, apparently in acknowledgement that even though the virus may be on its way out, its personal impact remains universal yet strangely alienating. Like many tracks on Day/Night, it only really makes sense when you see a crowd of revellers singing and dancing along to the chorus.
It would be wrong to reduce Day/Night to Happy/Sad. The distinction between albums is something deeper than that, and there’s plenty of emotional contrast to be found on both sides of the record. On Day, for example, the remarkably minimalist and mellow Theworstthing brings us back down to earth after Comingback. In an album packed with flashy production and even a dozen strings players, there’s beauty in the simplicity of a melody, a bassline and a backbeat. Other instruments only arrive when the time is right. Jules Crommelin’s pained and superbly controlled guitar solo is an equisite face-scruncher, while Louie Swain’s simple but effective keys riff does well to wrap things up.
If the ultra-slick Bee Gees disco of Famous doesn’t compel you to jump up from your seat and bust out a few moves like it’s 1977, there’s frankly something wrong with you.
Theworstthing‘s antithesis can be found in the maximalist extravagance of Famous. Positioned firmly within the supposedly moody and depressing world of Night, the no-nonsense intro is easily Night‘s most thrilling sonic surprise. Much more than a mere foot-tapper, if the ultra-slick Bee Gees disco of Famous doesn’t compel you to jump up from your seat and bust out a few moves like it’s 1977, there’s frankly something wrong with you. Serret’s thump, Crommelin’s precise rhythm guitar and Hill’s pounding bass octaves all combine to produce a glorious few minutes of dancefloor hedonism that wouldn’t sound out of place alongside the retro classics of the genre; the titular hook seems as inevitable and irresitible as a certain Tragedy. An abrupt groove change to a slower, even funkier 16 bars is welcome, but a second sharp left-turn in the direction of smoky late night jazz seems a little unnecessarily jarring.
Day/Night mostly succeeds in avoiding the habit of producing an anthology of singles, which the debut album somewhat fell pray to. Opener LIGHT rewards patience with a masterclass in musical world-building. Over six minutes, the band (and their highly-important group of strings players) aimed to recreate the rising sun in music, and as far as I’m concerned, they couldn’t have done a better job. LIGHT develops like a modern day answer to Grieg’s Morning Mood, unfolding gradually at first before the arrival of a stunning wall of vocals which feel just as awe-inspiring as the sight of a giant orange globe appearing on the far horizon. It’s a stylistic high that few of the more conceptual tracks like in Day/Night ever quite live up to, with corresponding sunset track SHADOW sounding inevitably half-baked in comparison. At other times, the mellower tracks can come and go almost completely unnoticed. Reflex and the virtually interminable Nightwalk provide some interesting and creative soundscapes at the heart of Night, but lack the emotional contrast and excitement of some earlier numbers. That’s not to say that the understandable sleepiness throughout Night is an inherent weakness. On the contrary, the quiet and brooding Thefear presents Parcels at their most sinister, with eerie strings and a dirty bass guitar seemingly ready to score the next series of Black Mirror. The reversed vocals towards the end do end up sounding a little silly, but atmosphere is quietly restored by a genuinely alarming strings crescendo, growing like a monster until it overpowers the rest of the band completely.
It’s all very pretty, but there’s a niggling sense that the band ought to have gone one step further.
After Thefear‘s drama, there’s a somewhat underwhelming end to the two albums. Once is a slightly bizarre turn towards melancholic country music, but all potential built up during verse one is lost as the melody meanders and wanders, failing to find a compelling chorus along the way. Closer Inside sounds fatally unlike a closer. Instead, it’s a lightly funky yet uninspiring loop that does little to tie up the loose threads of the album. Interestingly, Day closer Outside is a much more impactful ballad about how Crommelin felt abandoned by his wayward father. “Where did you go?”, he heartbreakingly belts at one point, in close two-part harmony that cuts like a knife. It’s a while before the song reaches its climax, and when we get there there’s a niggling sense that the band ought to have gone one step further. It’s all undeniably very pretty, but I’m certain they could have made it all sound a bit bigger and bolder in the end, with more harmonic progression than three tried-and-true pop chords.
Whilst Outside may suffer from homogeny, daring groove changes can be found all other the two albums, to mixed results. The switch to pitch-black jazz funk on Daywalk – especially after such an overtly cheery intro – is inspired, and the playful improvised interplay between rhodes and guitar is a joy to behold. It’s also a great opportunity for Hill to unleash his full potential in the low end of the mix, his basslines growing ever busier and more spectacular as the song builds to a finale. In contrast, the incessant groove changes on LordHenry (apparently a somewhat lazy reproduction of “luxury is a curse” adage popularised by The Picture of Dorian Gray) result in a uniquely messy and shambolic track. Little to no effort is made to somehow make a boring verse and overbearing chorus make sense next to one another, given that they both sound like completely different songs. Switching back and forth between the two is simply jarring and uncomfortable, and any philosophical messages embedded in the chorus are lost in all the musical clutter that surrounds it.
Listened to in its entirety, Day/Night reveals a band willing and able to shrug off the popular assumptions that they are nothing more than specialists in happy and superficial little electropop songs. Whilst there’s plenty of happiness to be found on Day/Night (particularly during its near flawless first 30 minutes), the two albums also offer plenty of depth and introspection, and the great risk of producing not one but two concept albums has – on the most part – paid off. It’s a staggering achievement, with enough complexity and ambition to make you worry how on earth the band plan on building from it on their next release. For now, however, the Crommelin, Hetherington, Hill, Swain and Serret have more than earnt their ensuing world tour, which is already garnering glowing reviews, to the surprise of absolutely no one. It seems like a long wait before I’ll be able to catch them on a visit to Manchester a year from now. It’s just as well that, as my dad would say, Day/Night is an album worth spending plenty of time with.