PREMIERE The Parlor, 'Sun By Day | Moon By Night'

On the edges between the earth, the sky, and eternity with The Parlor’s Jen & Eric; photographed by Alison Bachorik.

The Parlor are the northeastern cult phenomenon that have remained a favorite of obscure pop heads for years. The duo of Albany, NY based artists Jen O’Connor and Eric Krans have specialized in works that swim in the schools of the psychic and radically sincere and today present their most monumental release yet with a double disc that emulates your favorite counter culture independent radio frequencies in a psychotropic feast for the entirety of the senses. In collaboration with longtime friends Justin Beauregard and Kevin Outland, together they unleash the spiritual-diurnal shifts of the soul, self, and consciousness with the cosmic mind twist of Sun By Day | Moon By Night.

"Come on Man" treads towards those mythic gates of dawn that inverts late 60s conceptual album lore with the 90s revivalists and the like. Those sentiments keep riding high on the texturally woven waves of "The Sacred is the Sweetest" that rolls with attitude, and kaleidoscopic eyed visions. The throwbacks and river routes of memories swim easy on "Orange and Yellows" that rock like a hypnogogic Kurt Vile heartland hop & bop. Inspirations, iconoclasts, and hagiographies are intertwined together on "Jung Christ Cobain" in a volatile combination of influences that traverse through the meadows of messianic miasma in the valley of the shadow selves. "Shine Like the Universe is Yours" encourages the listener to let their little light glow like the incandescent luminescence of a humble flat on the hill whose illuminations can be seen by all.

The metaphysical and philosophical mode of mesmerization makes motions toward the romantic on "Pearl Haired Girl". The spiritual and physical plains collide with la la la la la choruses that move from the celestial planes and into the romantic pastoral fields of flora and fauna skipping together in equal time. Then pensive and subterranean thought trails run through trails full of bramble and thorny thickets on the cathartic night roaming primal howls of "Wolf Suit".

We are treated to samples from Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz on "LoveShadow", an interlude that guides you to altars of independent idols. "Worcester County Laketown" arrives like a throwback 90s Matador party that jogs the memories and turns the pages of the faded sepia-toned photo albums that pile up in the corners of the mind. The Parlor pushes past the pageantry of the pastiche with "Light in the Darkness" that strikes the heart at the center of the self & spirit that initiates an emotional response that traverses the way a cosmic ballad transports the senses during an encore at an autumnal festival.

That day-glo tie-dyed shine remerges triumphantly on "Open Your Eyes I Love You" that harkens back to those exotica records that you find buried in the used vinyl section of your local Goodwill. The mysticism rises like the dewy morning mist on "What’s In Your Soul", riding into the celebration of being sensitive and receptive to others, the world, the cosmos, and the intuitive on the fuzzed out fog machine fumes of "HSPs Don't You Ever Get Numb". That sentiment grows even louder, cooler, and steely eyed on the foothill stepping sonic alps of "Mountain Song", while the meditational instrumental of "Don't Go Back to Sleep" offers a midnight ceremony that seeks the wisdom that arrives in the exchanges of nocturne prayers.

The Parlor’s Jen & Eric; photographed by Alison Bachorik.

The inward and outward reflections sail into the morning light of "In the Bedroom at Sunrise" that casts sleepy and swaying privy poetics in the candid boudoir sanctuaries at the start of the solar sphere's daily ascent. The psych dripped sludge of "Brownout" embodies the sweltering feeling of finding relief, shade, and coolness from the harsh elements during the common occurrences of abnormally severe heat waves. The hot and bothered doom tripping is then transformed into a trip into the nouvelle vague boulevards of "A Clock Without Time" that speeds through the twisting cobble stone rues like a wayward romantic peddling ahead on bicycle in tune to the rhythm of a pulsing heartbeat.

The Parlor launch their grand exeunt with "Emma Alice Evie" that concludes their majestic, epic artistic excursion with heaps of heart, heads held high, familial charm, with a wholesome feeling that hope remains (despite it all). Just as the moon reflects the blooming beams sent forth by the sun, The Parlor shares a holistic hymnal of the greatest post-modern compilation of heady styles that you have always dreamed of.

Album art courtesy of the artists.

Jen O’Connor and Eric Krans provided expansive and privy reflections and histories on the new album:

Jen on the history behind the album

Eric was about 11 years old when he met Outback; the new kid on the bus with a rat tail. His name was Kevin Outland but the bus kids dubbed him Outback and it stuck. It wasn't long before they were playing street hockey and listening to Nirvana, Alice In Chains and Helmet while evading parental oversight.

When Eric was cut from the JV basketball team at 16, he opened the catalog to Musician's Friend and picked out a Squire guitar and Carver amp. Standing at a bay of lockers the next day at school he spotted Bush's Sixteen Stone on the top shelf of the locker next to him. He'd just heard "Everything Zen" on WAAF.

"Do you play guitar?" his locker friend asked.
"I just ordered one," said Eric.

When the boxes arrived they formed a punk band called The Human Tree Stumps, named after the Living Forest in Mortal Kombat 2. Practicing in a garage, they played only one show to neighborhood passers-by when they decided to open the garage door that summer day in ‘96.

Eric and his locker friend Dan LeFleur went on to form a Catherine Wheel + STP influenced band called Carolina Satellite that took part in Armageddon II; The Battle of the Bands at Tantasqua Regional High School. They came in second to The Westies (whose lead guitarist James Lynch went on to join Dropkick Murphys).

In 1998 during our Freshman year at UMass Amherst, Eric and I met in one of the elevators of our dorm. On my way to choir I would see him in his room with his guitar or playing in the lounge. Eventually I brought down my notebooks and added lyrics to his scribbled chords sheets.

Between semesters back in Central Mass Eric reconnected with Outback. With Kevin on bass and their friend George on drums they practiced in Grandma Krans' basement and George's attic. A nameless band that only performed for shag carpets and cardboard boxes. Waiting tables all day and into the evening, and then making the rounds of basements, garages, and attics late into the night, Eric often found himself playing with Jubba: a technical, jam-centric drummer whose skill was unmatched by any Eric had ever played with.

Back at UMass Eric joined an indie jazz band called Fire Engine Red and the emo band Marvis, playing shows at the dining commons and a clandestine show on the roof of a dorm. I stuck to singing lyrics and learning guitar in my childhood bedroom or dorm rooms with the door closed and the black light on. Junior year we both joined Fierce Mullet. Occasionally we’d run into Outback bartending at the local bar, and Jubba at Phish concerts and Mountain Jam when we played there with Sgt. Dunbar.

A few months into the pandemic, during a weekly Zoom cocktail hour/high school reunion that slid into an all-nighter, Eric reconnected with his two old friends. And after lock-down ended he invited them to come out for a weekend to play some music. Jubba and Outback returned for long weekends over the course of several years. We added songs and we took some away. In the end, half the songs on the record feature them, and while we've collaborated with many musicians on our recordings over the years, this is the first time anyone other than Eric has played the drums or bass on any of our records.

Eric said playing with them again felt like putting on your favorite pair of shoes, and it sounded that way too. Some of the recordings on this album are from that very first session. And a handful are un-edited first takes.

In the beginning, the record was shaping up to be wordless jams, surf-rock inspired mantras without lyrics based on guitar melodies, bass lines, and rhythms Eric had written. An entirely different project made up of three old friends who used to play together when they were young (they started calling themselves The Street Kids). But I kept watching and listening and one day I came in with my notebooks and scribbled some lyrics and sang some melodies and not soon after we knew this was going to be a Parlor record. Eric and I spent months that turned into years shaping and editing and producing. Adding instruments, harmonies, and background vocals, arranging new parts, searching for samples and collaging found sounds. Then using similar methods to digitally collage the album art.

This record is not just about the music. It feels like our whole histories conspired to create Sun By Day | Moon By Night. It’s an album we dreamed about in the 90s that had to wait for the right moment to arrive. It might have happened in 2000 if we’d known how to do it. We were in overlapping music projects at that time, following our noses out of grunge rock. But there’s a universe in which we formed a band then, and it went on to rule the world. Or at least it’s fun to imagine it did.

The album is meant to be listened to front to back. Intended to be experienced in totality. Like a curiosity shop or haunted house; whose rooms bend you toward the next one and the one after that, until you're lost inside and feel as if you might never get out, but at some point you stumble out the other end, bewildered, excited, inspired.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Like this group of musicians who started as childhood friends and somehow took 25 years to form a band.

Album art courtesy of the artists.

Eric on the meaning behind the record

Chasing symbols through the psychological realms does something magical to the mundane. Connections appear between things that seemed disjointed before. The world comes alive in colors and shapes. Meaning fills in every space until the entire internal and external world are animated with Self. Where we start and where we end merges into a universal oneness of meaning. Where a starlight canoe trip across a lake in my hometown to befriend a kindred spirit turned into a vision quest where I saw my town's history in the water, and had a flash of realization that baptism is about the death of the old identity more than it is about the birth of the new.

‘Throw my body in the water / watch me sink down to the bottom / throw my body in the water / let it decompose into lake mud / Go build big houses and buy motor boats, wakeboard into the sunset / and when you go swimming / try not let your toes touch the mud / as you watch me disappear into oblivion / throw my body in the water / watch me disappear into oblivion.’

What is it about the shadow aspects of our psychology that seem so scary? Most of our closest friends and loved ones have a general intuitive sense of our shadow selves (though not their own). Fragments are revealed against our best efforts. We betray ourselves. The persona masks only so much. And our loved ones typically love us in spite of what we hope they never see. But we are desperate to believe that we are performing a perfect act. We martial our social-spiritual powers to conceal the darkness within, saying to ourselves We are who we want others to believe we are, and they believe it and so do I. It's all completely unconscious — part of the great theater of human culture. Life as the stage.

The danger in the performance is in mistaking our persona for our Self. When I look at reality where are my blind spots? How can I ever be fully integrated with all aspects of my self if I'm unwilling to look at some of them? That's why wisdom and self-knowledge are two sides of the same coin. Know thyself is the kernel at the center of all the wisdom traditions.

So knowing ourselves then requires going into the darkness. Facing the demons. Lurking in the shadows. Remembering the uncomfortable. Accepting the ugly.

I found that my archetypes are Carl Jung, Jesus Christ, and Kurt Cobain. Jung helped me see that the universal love of Christ and Cobain's fuck you rejection of the hypocritical, the manipulative, and the conditional are two ends of a certain polarity that arise codependent on each other. They are perhaps the heaven and hell of the enmeshed family. And by carrying a light into the darkness I found that I'm living in a cognitive dissonance as an environmentalist who takes more from mother nature than is sustainable, but I'm too comfortable and my community and my family are too important to me to change more radically.

‘Wildfires are epic cigarettes / Smoking Earth and high on Karmic debt... It’s not my fault I just want to be adored / I tried my best I just want to be adored / I’m only human and I can’t stand being bored / And I took what you gave me but I always wanted more.’

Diving into our personal myths as a hero's journey can be an adventure. A midlife reorientation. Finding symbols that resonate with our Selves. Listening to the omens, the weather and the animals. Learning from the difficult interpersonal dynamics. Mapping and naming the soul.

Individuation is a baptism. An opportunity to tear down the old identity, strip it of as much ignorance as we can find, and then go back into the world where identity magically reforms in every relationship. A slightly more distilled and pure persona emerges and life is a little bit lighter. Each of the songs on the Sun By Day half of the record came out of moments of identity tear-down for me. Moon by Night for Jen. Each time it gets a little easier but each time we get closer to the source wound which is the most elusive of all. The core belief at the foundation of all confusion is a shadowy figure. A puppeteer. And the hope that inspires noble selflessness, the aiming to Love unconditionally, is tied to a string of confusion, controlled by the puppeteer within. Unless we untie the knot.

‘Love or confusion / Love or confusion / it isn't all just about Love.’

The Parlor’s new album Sun By Day | Moon By Night is out now.