I first saw (and heard) at a show at the Grace Darling last week.
On the way to the show a rough-looking guy with a slurring speech impediment asked me for change at the tram stop. I obliged and he sat down and started to chat about how he was going to give me a planet. It’s not every day you’re offered a galactic landmark, so I made sure I hadn’t misheard. No, it was a real planet. He was going to give me a planet and I’d get it when he died, and it would be the second-best planet, because he had saved the best one for himself.
This guy was a god, you see, or the second coming of capital ‘g’ God, his theological scheme swapping in the middle of sentences. Being a god was hard, because you had to give good people planets to live on, and find the bad people like child molesters or drug dealers and turn them into dogs and cats and things. They would come back in the next life as dogs and cats and then if they were good like that, then they could become people again.
I mention this interaction because I was going to the gig alone, so I had a lot of the time on the tram and at the bar just thinking about what this guy said to me and what his experience of life must be like, so you may have a better idea of the weird mindset I was in when Parading took to the stage.
I also mention it because the more I think about it, the more this guy and Parading have in common. There was something that cracked me up in a man who gifts planets and turns the evil into beasts, just sitting at a tram stop, politely asking people for change. If it was omnipotence, it was an amiable, non-threatening sort of omnipotence, and that’s what Parading sound like.
Because Parading have clearly taken a leaf from the vintage shoegaze textbook, that worship the electronic guitar signal - that sound that makes you think of unstoppable natural phenomena like earthquakes or volcanoes or stars collapsing in on themselves. But they’re not scary or unpleasant, like I imagine an earthquake or a volcano or a star collapsing in on itself might be. It’s loud, fucking loud, but nice. Nice like a guy offering you a planet in exchange for two bucks.
So Parading were great, exactly what I wanted to hear that night. I then find out their video for ‘ Country Song ’ just came out, from their new album Swallowing A Sunflower , which is out next month. Maybe you’ll see what I mean by amiable omnipotence – the raging fires of electric guitar tempered by acoustic strumming and the distant murmur of Tom Barry ’s vocals.
So have a listen because they really made my night. It went downhill rapidly after they finished as some toothless, old, drunk jerk started talking the lingering melodies out of my head with some completely unsolicited bullshit about how he’d seen the Woodstock movie on TV the other night. Well done, mate. Don’t be a dickhead at shows guys.
WORDS BY Matt Nielson
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