The World Without Parking Lots is the project of Chicago’s Ethan T. Parcell. Although technically the project’s third release, new album Seventh Song Counts the Engines is the first that puts Parcell’s vocals front and centre, his lyrics unpretentiously poetic amidst the quietly complex music.
Combining the ruminative atmosphere of a Lily Tapes release with the understatedly devastating writing of Talons’, Mount Eerie or early Trouble Books, Seventh Song Counts the Engines sees The World Without Parking Lots make something that’s equal parts sad and hopeful, bummed out bedroom folk songs for the twenty-first century.
The album opens with ‘Famous Horse Race’, a song that introduces this hushed and undeniably affecting vibe excellently. Opening with a despondent bus ride, things grow increasingly opaque, ending with murmured free verse that feels like an Impressionistic portrait of a thousand thoughts and feelings, lending new significance to the superimposed writing of the album’s artwork. “There’s a place where the lightness behind heaviness sits,” Parcell sings, “that I can only hold when the message hits behind an impulse and electric stay-awake but staying awake has it’s limits.”
There’s a lot of emotional abstraction in ‘The Inventor of Common Law Marriage’ too, Parcell’s words creeping sidelong at the edges of a situation, somehow saying nothing and capturing everything with its talk of narrow eyes and rodent-killing vultures.
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Perhaps the saddest song you’ll ever hear about the “ever entertaining jewels” of colourful TV, ‘Cartoon’ is stripped right back, just gentle guitar and barely-there vocals. The whole thing is infused in sombre melancholy, but it’s the last line that stands out, a starkly beautiful piece of poetry that somehow feels like the perfect ending, a glimmer among the subdued hues.
“Grey estate, golden age blood moon
tear my winter coat in two”
Rattling around for a minute or so, ‘The Petition on the Emptier Parts’ eventually finds its rhythm as Parcell sings from a post-industrial malaise. “He’s reopening all the old factories,” he sings, “and this town could really use it right now.” ‘Seventh Song’ is a gentle instrumental interlude, guitar softly chiming beneath a layer of radio crackle, before closer ‘Sorel & Mare’ arrives in the rhythmic sway of guitar. Typically oblique, the song is seemingly simple but rendered dense and cryptic with the addition of Parcell’s poetry, packing a huge emotional punch in the process.
“and he counts the engines
one by one by one by the sound alone
by one by one by one
and he weighs his bringings
one by one by one hand alone”
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Seventh Song Counts the Engines is a beautiful collection of songs, one which somehow makes a bold statement in a circuitous whisper, deceptively complex instrumentation and ambiguous lyrics capturing decidedly unambiguous emotion. Quite where Parcell takes The World Without Parking Lots next is left unclear, though we cannot wait to find out.
The album is out now and you can get it as a name-your-price download from The World Without Parking Lots Bandcamp page.