One Liner: 70's indebted funky dance pop, but sounds like the live show may just be EDM
Poster Position: TOP Quarter - Line 3
Both Weekends.
Sunday at 7:30
Miller Lite Stage
Thoughts: I have to say I am confused how this is up here on line 3. It is perfectly acceptable funkpopdiscosynth, but I would expect to have heard of the things that are up here on the third line. Sort of has a Jungle vibe, but a little further towards synth-y disco.
Four of the members went to the same school growing up, and started sliding in and out of musical projects together as young as thirteen years old. Wikipedia says that they experimented with everything from metal to bluegrass to folk before landing on white-guy-disco-funk as their final spot. Two of them were the acoustic folk duo named Louie and Patrick. Several of them were the roots music group The Sugar Spinners. Some of them formed the rock group Lifeline. They also formed something called Potato Potato. Some of these bands got radio play and festival lineup spots. But then in their final year of high school, Parcels formed, named after a sign maybe stolen from a train station, and the group then moved to Berlin.
Which seems like a weird move on it's own, and then this is the explanation as to why: "The band notes watching a video in high school of band The Whitest Boy Alive performing in a shop window in Mitte, Germany as influential to the move, saying that the "huge crowd on the street [...] was super cool". Sure. One show, by one completely non-memorable band, and you should just pick up stakes and move across the world to a place where you don't speak the language. Fine.
But it worked out. A French label liked their initial electronic EP, signed them, and then brought them to Paris for a show at a bar. Daft Punk happened to be in the audience, and they invited these dudes to the studio to collaborate. The band showed Daft Punk an early demo of "Overnight," and the robot fellas agreed to get to work with it. Wikipedia says it took more than a year, with many studio trips and months in the studio. Are you kidding me? It is an entirely generic disco pop nugget that has a little of "Get Lucky" guitar swing in it. 215.1 million streams.
That took a full year and many studio visits? I mean, its a nice little funky strut and all, but I feel like this could have been done in 30 minutes. They didn't even make a video for it. I feel like there has to be something more to this band, like one of the members is the son of the owner of Universal Music or something.
A couple singles and old EPs, followed by 2018's Parcels, 2021's Day/Night, and 2025's LOVED. Strangely, none of their biggest tunes are on any of those albums. Not sure what would make a band leave their biggest singles off of the next album, that doesn't seem to click for me. So, their biggest streamer is a 2018 single called "Tieduprightnow," with 321.2 million streams, that was not then put onto the 2018 debut album for some reason (and same with "Overnight"). Odd.
Again, a perfectly acceptable little funk nugget to groove along to. Also, I very much would like to go surf and hang out with those people on the beach. That looks very chill and fun. "Comedown" gets a little jammy, which I appreciate. I think I need to ask my girls about this band and see if I can figure out what is going on here. I like it well enough, I dig rock and funk and all of that, but this one is just striking me as odd.
But then, I fired up the more recent live album available on Spotify. I think this is going to end up being another EDM-ish group once they are on stage. Sounds very much like they are turning their disco funk into a rave. It is much, much worse than just the regular studio music. That is a bummer.
I asked the girls. 18 year old said she had never heard of it. The 15 year old never responded. Chef's kiss.
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