Punch and Judy at the Lunar Pawnshop
Download full album
Generally speaking, birds are unusual creatures. But there’s something especially odd about the parrot. For one thing there’s the color scheme—that casually garish combination of scarlet and acid-green. But mostly the parrot’s strange character is defined by its use of language. Granted there are other birds that have appropriated speech, but none have put it to such devilishly subversive uses as the parrot, who has the ability to transform even the most mundane phrases into wise-cracks.
The parrot is the master of the put-down, the one-liner, and the comic aside. The parrot is the W.C. Fields of the bird world. And yet (and this is a big “yet”), the parrot does not really understand what it’s saying—its language capacity is an illusion, simple mimicry. That the parrot can be at once oblivious to the linguistic content of its utterings, and still be the master of irony—that species of humor that demands that the speaker know not only the surface meaning of a phrase, but the latent meaning as well, and to craft them both into the perfect cutting edge—that takes us into the realm of the uncanny. It reveals the parrot as an affront (a threat even) to our every-day edifice of logic and reason. It shows that the parrot is as much Marcel Duchamp as W.C. Fields.
At this point, I should note the marked similarities between the parrot, the tropical bird, and Ping Pong Parrot. Parrot, the Ping Pong, is quite as colorful as his ornithological namesake. Indeed, the audacity of his sound pallet is one of the first things that I noticed in his music. Starry Dynamo, for instance, weaves gorgeous bell tones and pastel buzzes into a slunky 70’s drone-groove. Self Portrait drops play-school piano notes into a swirling brew of electro quirps and wheezes. And Sun splashes around golden chords from the Farsifa Organ that swallowed Jackson Pollock. In fact, it’s hard to imagine an album as sonically diverse as this one.
As for Ping Pong Parrot's relationship with the world of reason and logic… well, it’s at least as contentious as that of the feathered parrot. In music, reason and logic are most in evidence in form—be it verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus or exposition/development/recapitulation, or any of the other standard plans. Ping Pong Parrot has no use for any of them. This Parrot’s music moves of its own accord, its direction determined by some mysterious pre-conscious instinct. There’s no moving from point A to point C via point B here. A Parrot tune would just as well begin at X, jump to B(RxU)m, split in two, double back, do a summersault, stop for a drink, and then swallow its tail. And yet for all the genuine chaos of their paths, they never make a false move. Never. Uncanny.
Yep. Parrots are odd birds. But they make good companions. For all their cussedness and contrariness, they’re stone entertaining, and they got a mainline connection to the It behind the What. Perch a parrot on your shoulder (or in your ipod—if it's, you know, the musical parrot) and you’ll never want for distraction.
Dave Keifer
