Parenthetical Girls

Initially launched as an informal home recording endeavor by longtime friends Zac Pennington, a rock writer, and part-time musician Jeremy Cooper, Parenthetical Girls slowly expanded from private sessions into live performances. Drawing on their shared enthusiasm for British post-punk, Brian Eno, and Phil Spector, the pair produced whimsical indie rock tracks in 2002 through a basic eight-track setup built around glockenspiel, a low-cost synthesizer, and a persistently mistuned guitar. Early efforts failed to satisfy them, so the recordings sat unused until Pennington reviewed selections again in 2003 and chose to restart the project. He delivered the original tapes to two musicians he respected, Jherek Bischoff of the Dead Science and Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu, inviting each to remix the seven songs recovered. The pair approved the outcomes enough to issue the results as a self-titled debut under the Parenthetical Girls name, placing Bischoff’s mixes on the vinyl LP’s “X” side and Stewart’s versions in matching sequence on the “O” side. Limited touring followed, first with Cooper absent while Pennington appeared alongside Bischoff and Sam Mickens, another Dead Science member, then with Pennington and Mickens alone. When the debut reached CD reissue in 2006, Cooper had stepped away from regular involvement, so the second album, Safe as Houses, emerged in mid-2006 chiefly from Pennington and Bischoff. The lineup later settled around Pennington and multi-instrumentalists Matt Carlson, Eddy Crichton, and Rachael Jensen, while Bischoff remained a studio collaborator. This formation brought in 25 classically trained musicians for the third album, Entanglements, which moved the music toward expansive orchestral arrangements and appeared on Tomlab in 2008. The following year brought the mini-album The Scottish Play: Wherein the Group Parenthetical Girls Pay Well-intentioned (If Occasionally Misguided) Tribute to the Works of Ivor Cutler. The band next undertook a larger-scale effort, issuing a series of limited-edition EPs over 15 months, each featuring one member’s portrait on the cover, with tracks from those EPs forming the fourth album, Privilege (Abridged), released in 2013.