Parasol is leaving in a week for a short tour to both Plan-It-X Fest and Do You Hear We Fest! Hope to see friends at some shows and for hangs!! Thanks SO MUCH to anyone/everyone who has helped us with shows on this tour. Summer is so packed and we really appreciate it!!
Weds 6/18 Philly, PA
https://www.facebook.com/events/1395251857430251/
Thurs 6/19 Pittsburgh, PA
https://www.facebook.com/events/600709146692125
Fri 6/20 Plan-It-X Fest! Bloomington, IN
Sat 6/21 Plan-It-X Fest! - Playing Saturday at 5pm!
Sun 6/22 Maybe Chicago? Halp!!
Mon 6/23 Milwaukee
https://www.facebook.com/events/306770952781183/
Tues 6/24 Grand Rapids, MI
https://m.facebook.com/events/749460675085163/
Weds 6/25 Athens, OH
https://www.facebook.com/events/674107552654819
Thurs 6/26 Asheville, NC @ TBA
Fri 6/27 Do You Hear We Fest, Chatanooga, TN
Sat 6/28/DYHW, Chatanooga, TN
Playing Saturday at 6:30p @ Sluggos!
https://www.facebook.com/events/589800197779452
Sun 6/29 Richmond, VA
https://www.facebook.com/events/247102692153407
Mon 6/30 Willimantic, CT
https://www.facebook.com/events/598516133596105
PSYCHIC TEENS
Philadelphia’s best.
dark, heavy and droney in all the right ways.
I know “goth” is a popular thing right now and not to put this band into a category but they are doing it right.
LOUD AS HELL.
psychicteensnetwork.com
PARASOL
on tour from Boston
pop punk but not in the stereotypical sense.
very honest but catchy and still raw enough to appeal to the more punk side of pop punk.
http://parasolma.bandcamp.com/
HOUND
local headbanging riffmasters
http://wearehound.bandcamp.com/
CRYBABY
pop punk from hereish
haven’t played in a while because one of them messed up their arm in a gnarly skateboarding accident
http://crybabypa.bandcamp.com/
7:30 pm $6
ALL AGES
I contributed to this article, compiled by Allison Crutchfield, that is a response to that crummy Noisey article, “How to Survive Being the Only Girl in a Band.”
I am so grateful to know and be among so many smart, talented, and fearless women.
Here is an animated show flyer I made for this gig as well as a printable one. Feel free to post use print whatevers…..
Delay (https://delayoh.bandcamp.com/) - Columbus, Ohio’s long-running, always-evolving pop-loving punks. New album coming soon via Salinas Records.
Martha (http://marthadiy.bandcamp.com/) - UK pop punk/power pop. On tour with Delay. New album coming soon via Salinas Records.
Parasol (http://parasolma.bandcamp.com/) - Boston buddies.
Baha Blatz (no internet presence) - New band from here featuring people who rule who are in bands that rule.
This will actually start at seven, and be OVER by 9:30. Please bring $5-7 dollars for touring bands and buy LPs from touring bands.
VOICE YOUR OPINION! VOICE YOUR OPINION! VOICE YOUR OPINION!
Some of the answers to questions that Parasol made in this The Le Sigh Interview were cut short because of space! Some of the information that was cut we found relevant or important, especially since we were talking about abuse, capitalism and its effects on us both personally and politically. We have decided to publish the full interview in the read more link below!! Thanks to The Le Sigh for the spot on their blog!
TLS: How did Parasol form? What was your first show like?
Vicky: Parasol formed after Lily and I met in Florida, where I saw her play in her old band, Inertia. We recognized each other from both living in Boston, and exchanged contact info. Back in Boston, she started coming over to me and Jake’s house to hang out and play music in our basement, and I guess that’s when the band formed!
Our first show was in Western Mass at the Flywheel, with Bad Banana and Sourpatch. It was terrifying and kind of awkward, but really memorable.
Lily: Yeah I will never forget the day Vicky walked up to me on the street and asked me if I was from Boston. It almost felt like she was the first friend I met in Boston, and it was so weird that I was meeting her in Florida if all places! Playing music with Vicky and Jake, and now also Josh on second guitar happened and has grown in a really nice, organic way. Meghan Minor booked that show, who rules and who I look up to a lot so it was really exciting to play.
TLS: Where does the name Parasol come from?
L: We had the hardest time naming this band for some reason! An ex of mine was like “I have always wanted to name a pop-punk/dream-pop band Parasol” and we stole it and it stuck. Band names/naming songs is a really strange hard thing for me to nail down personally. I know other musicians like that too. I wonder why that is? Half of our song names are jokes/made up on the spot.
Jake: All of our songs have like five different names relating to different jokes at different practices. No one knows their real names, not even Lily. We need to refer to the records.
TLS: DIY spaces seem to be entering a new area of discussion and debate with the closing of 285 Kent. Why do you think DIY spaces are important and how have they affected Parasol?
L: When I was in my late teens and early 20s I was fortunate enough to have spent a lot of time in NY. I remember being amazed the first time I entered certain spaces in the city. Spaces like 285 Kent, The Feminista Loft, 538 Johnson, etc. were really important to me even though I didn’t get to actually live in NY for very long. They just showed me what could be possible in such a huge, seemingly disconnected city scene. That combined with the years I spent volunteering and booking at the DIY venue in my hometown of Tampa, FL. have made DIY spaces something I personally hold very near and dear to my heart. I played my first show in a house and then at Transitions Art Gallery in Tampa. Backyards, garages, living rooms all defined my ‘coming out’ years as a musician. The community and support I both got and gave was really important to me. It kills me to think about kids who might never get access to that...who might never get to experience venues or shows outside of bar settings, because it is considered “illegal”.
As a band, I feel that we have all had some sort of similar “magical” experience in walking into or discovering DIY punk, and suddenly feeling less alone or alienated. No matter how fleeting that moment might have been before we also were able to criticise it, or before it also showed its own set of problems to us. I think we all know that moment is really important to experience as a youth.
In Boston, we are having similar conversations after a semi-recent (what felt like complete) shut-down of some pretty crucial all ages spaces that were doing shows.. The ebb and flow of DIY spots here is so hard to deal with in our city. Lately, we can only have shows at bars (where usually a large percentage of the door $ for bands has to go to the bar) or in what appears to be a top secret location. The reputation of Boston being “hard to play” is not unwarranted. That being said, everyone that tries to book here, tries really hard to make things happen and the fact that they happen at all is really amazing when you think about it.
V: I think that DIY spaces have always been coming and going. The ebb and flow changes the scenes around the DIY spaces, making space for new people to step up and share their basement or figure out a new place to host shows. DIY spaces are important because anyone can be involved, regardless of age or experience. Everyone in Parasol prefers to play, book, and attend shows in DIY spaces -- it’s part of the fun of being a band for us.
TLS: What does it mean to be a non-dude in a pit of mostly dudes?
V: For me, it means being hyper aware of the people around me, and feeling on-guard all of the time. Luckily, Parasol hardly plays shows where Lily or I are the only non-cis-dudes.
L: Yeah I feel the same way as Vicky. I often feel preemptively really defensive and more aggressive than I would normally feel. When me and Vicky are like some of the only women presenting folks at a show it just makes me really hyper-aware of myself too.
I think about why that is a lot...the fact that most cis-dudes at shows don’t have to think about their gender in the same way that we do, if at all. I just had this conversation with my friend Aimee about how when we are the only women at a show, or on tour, or wherever we sort of negotiate ahead of time how we are going to present ourselves and what role we want to take as a ‘woman’ in those settings. It isn’t all the time, but I often wonder, why can’t we be ourselves? What is it to be ‘the self’ as a woman, and what does it take to feel that way? The need or urge to take on certain roles or play into archetypes (little sister/overbearing/motherly) so we do not get prayed upon or seem available is something I have talked about. Perhaps cis-men negotiate their identity in other ways, but I feel that this experience, of negotiating to compensate for your gender presentation, is very specific to those who are not in positions of social power or are often afraid to show their true identity in certain settings.
TLS: Many of your lyrics are about escaping and overcoming physical and mental oppression. What advice can you give about leaving unhealthy relationships?
L: This term ‘unhealthy’ can mean so many different things. Every relationship in your life at different times, can become unhealthy subtly and this unhealthiness can become visible without warning. It can be shocking to experience or witness.
It is hard for me to give general advice about ‘leaving’ these relationships when every scenario can be different. Sometimes you literally cannot leave without some sort of physical violence occurring in your life. Other times, with mental abuse for instance, you can feel so messed up and horrible about yourself as a person, that it feels impossible to do much of anything. It can feel like you need the person who is abusing you to validate your very existence. Leaving can be harder than staying.
Something I am working on now, even years after being in intimate relationships with abusive/really toxic people, is recognizing when I am starting to lose myself to a relationship. I am learning to acknowledging when I start to hide my emotions, or feel up against other powers that seem outside of my control in a relationship early. Realizing that you have let go of yourself or that someone has manipulated you into feeling like you aren’t worth anything is so hard to recover from. When I start to stop expressing my needs or desires in a relationship - when I stop doing things that I want to do or stop talking to people I really like, I ask myself why that is. What dynamics are emerging in my life that have caused me to stop taking care of myself or the people around me? I think that recognizing that regaining a sense of self, drive, and purpose to live and love and being excited about life for yourself, is a really big part of the healing process for me. Using myself as a guide has helped me make better choices in my romantic life and break some cycles of abuse that I am vulnerable to.
TLS: Your song "No Where To Go" includes the lyric "We laugh at talks of our futures / Because they don't look bright / We barely have the stars at night to guide us home / and nowhere to go." This feels depressingly relatable as a young adult. Could you explain your relationship with these lyrics?
L: I think I was thinking about the phrase “you have your whole life ahead of you” and how laughable that can seem when you are feeling completely uninspired by what your future is supposed to look like. We are supposed to be guided by hyper-materialist, ultra-capitalist standards that do not bring us any real happiness. So many people around my age in their mid- twenties and under/over feel really aimless right now and are scared of what our world will look like 10,15, and 20 years from now.
We have “no where to go” in a sense that there is no “up from here” which is what is prescribed in our culture as the thing we should care about most. We have been labeled the ‘Millennials’ by liberal media. We want to do so much, change so many things, but feel up against huge barriers environmentally, economically - war is everywhere...even the simplest things in life like the stars in the sky are becoming harder to see as we all move and migrate into cities because that is where jobs are. What are we guided by anymore?
Our friend Chris Lee wrote a piece on Millenials and Apathy that I really related to that you can find here: http://recapsmagazine.com/rethink/the-politics-of-apathy-by-christopher-j-lee/
J: I love this lyric. Older generations and the media - whether they are deluded by long-gone former realities of relative prosperity and stability through work ( which were only ever available to certain sectors of the population in the first place), or just cynical - talk about “millennials” being entitled and ungrateful and having no work ethic and so on and so on. We’re told that we don’t want to “put in work” or “pay our dues” because we don’t appreciate the unpaid internships, temp work, or stipended $5/hour non-profit sector work that we inevitably land in if we finish college, or the shit jobs we’re offered if we don’t. They misrepresent our ambivalence because they see those positions as stepping stones. But our generation doesn’t share that illusion. There’s nothing to step to, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Precarity isn’t the path to stability, it is overtaking stability.
For example - you don’t need to be steeped in political consciousness to see that Teach For America isn’t training graduates for full-time teaching jobs, its replacing full time teaching jobs with low-paying, temporary work. They are putting people in the position of literally erasing their own futures (for a below minimum wage stipend!). So what are those kids supposed to hope for? That’s how it is across the board, and its going to keep getting worse. Over the years a bunch of hotels in Boston have replaced huge segments of their permanent staff -people who had worked there 30 years - with temp positions. Those jobs are gone forever, and there aren’t jobs taking their place. We watch this happen and know that all we have to look forward to is unpayable student loans, or if we didn’t go to school, hopping from shitty restaurant to shitty restaurant, serving people who think we’re entitled and let us know with their contempt. (It obviously needs to be noted that in both examples above the jobs being “replaced” are often primarily staffed by women and more often women of color, who are being pushed into even darker depths of a deteriorating economy).
We know there is no return to prosperity and stability coming, those things drove the economy into crisis in the 70s. Capitalism calls stability “inflation,” and its been restructuring against stability for 40 years. That’s why the wage hasn’t risen with the dollar, that’s why the social safety net is gone (for those who ever had it), that’s one reason why 1 in 100 adults are in prison in the US, and it’s a major reason why they’ve ramped up the scapegoating, criminalizing, murdering, and displacing of immigrants, non-assimilating queers, women, people of color and so on. If you want proof that things are not going to get better under capitalism just look at how they are militarizing local police. It gives you a glimpse of how they expect things to go.
We know this intuitively because its our lived experience, hence our perceived ambivalence. But while the world sees our frustration and reads it as apathy, they don’t see our dreams. Our generation has a lot of dreams, they are just hard to see because they are structured on a different logic than that of capitalism. We have never seen hope in this system, it didn’t promise us anything like it promised (some of) our parents, so our dreams are made of different stuff, and that’s why its hard for them to see. Eventually, to achieve those dreams we will come up against a wall that compels us to tear this whole fucker down. In other words - by depriving us of hope, this system is creating its own worst nightmare. And that’s why they make up stories about us, so our rage looks illegitimate. Obviously this isn’t a new tactic, its always been utilized in -for example- criminalizing people of color, shaming and blaming women and so on. Its now being extended to larger portions of the population (in qualitatively different ways) as the portion of pie that gets shared grows smaller and smaller.
On the flip side, because precarity keeps us apart, a lot of what we do is try to find each other, and I think that’s reflected in a lot of Lily’s lyrics and in the spirit of DIY punk generally. Additionally, our “aimless” generation has made huge leaps in cultivating a generalized understanding of anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-oppression in general as a daily practice represented in our actions, while also ramping up our attacks on key sites of the reproduction of inequality. I’m thinking specifically of the prison abolition movement, border solidarity/anti-raid work, Strike Debt, the anti-foreclosure/eviction movements and so on. So I guess the point is, yeah, we do have bad work ethic and we’re not really motivated to throw our lives away for nothing, but we’re sure as hell motivated to tear down everything that compels us to. I think Lily’s lyrics get at both these points, the desperation and ambivalence and the search for each other and for something different.
TLS: What are (if there are any) some stereotypes you have encountered as a female in the punk scene?
V: The first that comes to mind with me is that “Girls make cute music.”
L: Yeah also like that women can’t set up gear or know their way around the more technical aspects of musical equipment. The stuff is so mystified and held like a secret language from people.
TLS: If you had to form a snack trifecta where each of you represents a certain snack, who would be what?
L: Josh would be Fritos, Vicky would be some sort of citrus, Jake would be trail mix, and maybe I would be a Larabar. I just named the things we bought the most of on our last tour, but WHATEVER. WE LOVE SNACKS SO MUCH.
J: Why trail mix?? People are gonna think I’m a hippy. Fun fact: the wikipedia page for “snack food” is the funniest thing in the world. We read it outloud in the van.
L: Dude I dunno! You are a mixed bag of awesome. You are like all the best things in one! You can be a different snack.
J: aw, stop it!
TLS: You've already sold pencils that say "Destroy Patriarchy." What would your dream merch be?
V: ACAB diva cups
L: I second the diva cup idea. Also maybe screen printed undies.
J: oooo I dunno, maybe like a ready made hex that you could use on your enemies. Parasol hex. I don’t know. Parasol tarot cards?
TLS: Finally, any recommendations for female-fronted punk bands that support similar ideologies as you?
L: Curmudgeon, Peeple Watchin’, Tomboy, Shady Hawkins, HIRS, Permanent Ruin, Trophy Wife...basically any band playing Smash It Dead Fest in March in Boston, female or not is rad and we love them!
Tomorrow is our LP release show in Boston! We are playing with friends in Fake, Springsteen and No Other! The record looks amazing and we are really proud of it!
Square of Opposition Records is another label that has helped in huge ways with our new release! Their webstore is live as of yesterday with 'Not There' in stock. Check out all the awesome bands on this label and pick up an LP if your feeling it!
