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“A winking homage to the works of performance artists like Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, and Bas Jan Ader, “A Note To Self” uses obsolete, era-appropriate video technology to painstakingly recreate the awkward, incidental, and ridiculously fetishized aesthetics of late 60s-early 70s performance art documentation. It’s supposed to make you feel that way.” -Zac Pennington

Unconventional is probably the most succinct way of putting it. Obsessive, eccentric, indulgent: they’re all equally fair. If Parenthetical Girls have learned anything over the course of their bewilderingly unorthodox discography, it’s that they are-for richer or for poorer-a necessarily singular pop group. It’s a peculiarity that they’ve learned to embrace-a single-minded conviction that pours itself over every corner of their latest album, Privilege. Tour dates are listed below. Also watch Pitchfork presents Parenthetical Girls performing “Curtains” on a deteriorating riverboat.

Having taken pop extravagance to its logical conclusion with their critically acclaimed, orchestral popopus Entanglements, Privilege finds a newly emboldened Parenthetical Girls giving the orchestra their leave-abrazen reinvention as immediate as it is inspired. Returning to its core membership of vocalist/creative director Zac Pennington and producer/arranger Jherek Bischoff (composer and collaborator with David Byrne,Amanda Palmer, Xiu Xiu, etc.), Privilege retains the group’s signature ambitions-visceral intimacy, camp austerity, lurid eloquence-while confidently embracing the perfect pop pastiche their previous records only alluded to. Anchored by Pennington’s distinctively lilting vibrato, Privilege is a cascade of grim particulars and gallows humor-an unflinching treatise on privilege, indiscretion, betrayal, sex and class politics, failure, and resignation. This is Parenthetical Girls in fighting trim: unbridled, unambiguous, and with a new creative candor that’s felt in both its words and music.

Originally recorded and self-released as a sequence of five self-contained, extremely limited 12″ EPs (each heroically hand-numbered in the blood of the group’s members, and available only through direct mailorder) the ambitious Privilege series was a grand and unequivocally impractical achievement. Privilege condenses the 21 recordings of the original series to a single, 12-track, remixed and remastered statement of purpose: a bold, strikingly cohesive pop clarion call that further solidifies Parenthetical Girls’ place amongst the most surprising and uncompromising pop groups at work today.

PARENTHETICAL GIRLS

03/06 Portland, OR – Holocene
03/07 Berkeley, CA – Starry Plough
03/08 Los Angeles, CA – The Smell
03/09 Phoenix, AZ – Trunk Space
03/10 Albuquerque, NM – Low Spirits
03/12 San Antonio, TX – Korova
03/13 Austin, TX – Red 7 – Force Field PR / Stones Throw Day Party – 2pm
03/13 Austin, TX – Valhalla – Nicodemus Agency Showcase – Midnight
03/16 Austin, TX – The Yellow Jacket – Impose / WNYC Party – 2:50pm
03/16 Austin, TX – Ten Oak – Apes on Tape – 11pm
03/17 Dallas, TX – Spillover Music Festival
03/19 Birmingham, AL – Bottletree
03/20 Atlanta, GA – The Earl
03/21 Chapel Hill, NC – Local 506
03/22 Washington, DC – TBA
03/23 Philadelphia, PA – PhilaMOCA
03/24 Hamden, CT – Outer Space
03/25 Brooklyn, NY – Glasslands
03/26 NYC, NY – Bowery Electric
03/27 Montreal, QB – Divan Orange
03/28 Toronto, ON – Double Double Land
03/29 Ann Arbor, MI – Arbor Vitae
03/30 Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle
03/31 Minneapolis, MN – TBA
04/02 Denver, CO – Hi Dive
04/03 Salt Lake City, UT – Kilby Court
04/04 Boise, ID – Flying M
04/07 Seattle, WA – Chop Suey

Parenthetical Girls
Privilege
(Slender Means Society / Marriage)
Street Date: Feb. 19, 2013
Formats: CD/DVD, LP/DVD, Digital

Track list:

1. Evelyn McHale
2. The Common Touch
3. Careful Who You Dance With
4. For All The Final Girls
5. The Pornographer
6. Sympathy For Spastics
7. Weaknesses
8. A Note To Self
9. Young Throats
10. On Death & Endearments
11. The Privilege
12. Curtains

plus: DVD featuring 7 promotional films, blood draw documentation, live performances, & other ephemera