Parcels – Live Vol.1

By George Moraitis

Label:	Because Music – BEC5650737, Kitsuné Musique – KMA073
Format:	2 x Vinyl, LP, Album
Country:	Europe
Released:	19 Jun 2020
Genre:	Electronic, Funk / Soul
Style:	Nu-Disco, Funk

Everyone has a friend who’s really into music but is also pretty fussy & careful with their recommendations. You know what I’m talking about… loves music but has high standards and rarely gets too excited about a new release.

I am happy to say that we have many of those friends and when they start sending you messages like “Man, you have to hear this album!”, you know you’re onto a good thing. In this case our dear friend Chris Camilleri made some noise about this album and with no hesitation, we ordered a couple of LP’s from Discogs.

A couple of months later, we realised that we’ve been playing this record almost every day and it has become a high rotation fixture at Nirvana Sound. Time to share it with you guys and before I forget, THANKS Chris!

Parcels is an Australian five-piece band that’s based in Berlin. They went from relative obscurity in Byron Bay, to being asked by Daft Punk to enter studio sessions together, to appearing at the All Points East Festival with Bjork in 2018, to headlining a show at Somerset House’s Summer Series last year.

Now this is a band that I assume are currently not so well known in Australia but if you’re a fan of fun disco style groovy music and you enjoy artists like Daft Punk & Khruangbin, you will LOVE this fine group of cool musicians. A few weeks ago, I emailed a few friends some Parcels video links and I received a few “OMG, they have become my favourite band!” style responses.

Parcels are conveyers of effortless, tight-as-a-nut grooves that seem to tap into your psychology and get your foot tapping before you’ve even realised you’re having fun. Far from being a three-chord disco band, Parcels can wield almighty, genre-bending electronic grooves.

‘Live Vol. 1’ takes place in Berlin’s Hansa Studio – an iconic recording location that hosted much of David Bowie’s recordings in the 1970’s and this band look and sound like they belong in that era. The album is even recorded on tape and comes with a professionally made video of the group in action (refer to the end of this review).

‘Enter’ introduces you to those foreboding piano chords that feature throughout their material and you start to groove to their tight transitions and runs. The third track ‘Bemyself’ is less complex and one of my favourites with the falsetto harmonies dancing around the funky guitar licks. Before you know it, you’re at the build-up for ‘Comedown’, featuring a lead guitar riff sounding as euphoric as ever. The build straight into ‘Lightenup’ has always been one of my highlights from the album, and the subsequent track is made even better through some double-guitar-solo action that had me practically boogieing with delight. So far the album is brimming with pure musical excellence.

‘Gamesofluck’ is perhaps one of the band’s most underrated songs. It’s in this song that the elusive dark side of Parcels also makes an appearance: there’s something electrifying and yet menacing about the guttural yelps four of them make in the chorus, which is made all the more impactful by the piercing falsetto. I feel this is a point where they’re making a statement before quickly returning to a more familiar sound.

The album then changes direction as a bass-slide sends us into the trap-tinged interlude track ‘Intrude’, a proper groove, that ominously wanders off into an eerie wind sound. The album surprises again with ‘Retuned’ where you experience a kaleidoscope of fuzzy voices, from self-important American football commentators, to mangled classical music, to fuzzy, rambling German voices….apparently the whole idea of the band was based on their emigration from Australia to Germany and poses deeper questions than you might come to expect from a studio-recorded live album.

At the heart of the debut lies a behemoth in the form of the eight-minute showpiece ‘Everyroad’. From a giant build-up emerges a chest-throbbingly fat synth bass that slaps you out of your funk-induced trance before a razor-sharp secondary synth chord deals an uppercut to the chin. This is a band at the peak of their powers; imaginative, awe-inspiring and utterly unpredictable. The influence of Daft Punk is evident in ‘Overnight’, a track produced the French legends.

‘Untried’ is yet another beautiful, previously unreleased interlude track that falls away into a truly gorgeous rendition of ‘Yourfault’, a song that feels like lying in a hammock under a tree on a golden summer’s afternoon. In ‘Redline’, Noah Hill takes a rest and leaves Patrick Hetherington to cover the low-end duties on a pulsating key bass. Patrick is also at the centre of the second new song, ‘Elude’.

With this song comes yet another new dimension to the band. It’s not malevolent electro like Redline but soaring, strikingly beautiful piano house music that is surely up there with the best material the band has released to date. A thumping piano gives way to a mournful keyboard melody that gets more and more impactful the more I listen to it. Elude is incredibly buoyant, and a sign that Parcels have much more to them than meets the eye, or ear!

Lost in my thoughts as I danced away to the inevitable set closer ‘Tieduprightnow’ (another one of my favourite songs on the album), I contemplated that Parcels are evolving into something that has a lot of potential. This album displayed some rawness, experimentation and ambition.

This is an infectiously groovy live album and I highly recommend it. Below is the Youtube version of the album – watch it if you have time as it is wonderfully immersive. The cohesion the band displays throughout Live Vol.1 is incredible and the authenticity of the entire album is on full display throughout the performance. Expertly mastered, this is comfortably one of the strongest albums to have come out of 2020 and is what propelled Parcels to the top of my playlists. An incredible experience from beginning to end, and you sense that this was just the beginning of something major for this group.

Here’s the album on YouTube:

Track listing

A1 Enter
A2 Myenemy
A3 Bemyself
A4 Comedown
A5 Lightenup
B1 Gamesofluck
B2 Intrude
B3 Withorwithout
B4 Retuned
B5 Everyroad
C1 Overnight
C2 Untried
C3 Yourfault
D1 Closetowhy
D2 Redline
D3 IknowhowIfeel
D4 Elude
D5 Tieduprightnow