When Parlour Bells released their nocturnal love-letter of an EP Thank God For The Night back in 2013, the party was still raging. And like any seasoned nightlife host, the Boston post-glam noir-pop band knew the morning would eventually come and wash clean the previous evening’s mischief. But what if that morning never came? What if revelers awoke after a spell to find a new party around them, devoid of the dreaded downtime that grounds our souls?
In the band’s new song, “Celebrities On Ice,” which you can preview below, the comedown is skipped in favor of a strange future world where pieces of the past are familiar, but slow to come together. The new single, part of a larger release expected later this year, takes the Bells through more sinister rock and roll territory, eliciting traces of early Jane’s Addiction and dousing them in iceberg synthesizers. In the future, we’re all on ice.
“When I set out to write songs for the new album, my abstract goal was to create a romantic sci-fi opera,” frontman Goddamn Glenn relays to Vanyaland. “The loose story is that a 21st century celebrity decides to escape becoming a has-been by having himself cryonically frozen and then awoken when people are once again nostalgic for his work. He is duped, however, wakes up bankrupt in a world that could care less about his fame. Desperate, he takes a job time-traveling, stealing patents from history’s greatest inventors and trading them for the most expensive fashions of his time. During his adventures, he falls in deeply in love with a sex android, renounces his life of time-traveling cyber crime and to stay in the same moment with her, forever.”
He adds: “In the celebs video, as I’d like to do it now, our protagonist teams up with his sexbot and helps liberate her fellow bots and in the end, he decides to give her free will, adjust her settings to ‘Autono Miss’ where he no longer can control her. But she decides to stay with him anyhow because… well, happy endings.”
Listen to an exclusive stream of Parlour Bells’ “Celebrities On Ice” below, and catch the band live on April 3 at T.T. The Bear’s Place in Cambridge on a glam-party rocking bill with Petty Morals, Party Bois, and Gene Dante & the Future Starlets.
