 "Photo: Photo courtesy of Chris Yasick")
Rock ’n’ roll is intangible: a feeling, a lifestyle, a way of connecting to something larger than yourself — about which it’s easy to get philosophical. Ask Mark Melicia, vocalist for New Jersey’s The Parlor Mob, what it means to him, and you get the same kind of answer. As he’s thinking about his response, you can see his wheels turning, working it out in his head.
“It’s all about action,” Melicia said. “When we’re on stage, the only thing we’re thinking about is being, letting it go in one end and come out the other.”
When he says this, he’s very soft-spoken. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was discussing something mundane. But just wait until nightfall, when the amps are on, the guitars are tuned and the microphones are live. This is when Melicia transforms and becomes something more than a mere definition of rock ’n’ roll. He is rock ’n’ roll. Ask anyone who attended the group’s show Friday night at Stubb’s indoor stage, and they’ll tell you the same.
After an uber-sexual show from local openers Scorpion Child, Melicia and company took the stage and played a refreshing live intro. They didn’t just launch into the first song, nor did they simply play a soundbite over the PA. They built the tension, with a drum and bass jam providing a segue into the Alice Cooper-esque “Hard Times.” But that was just the beginning.
Originally named What About Frank?, the band brings together a group of musicians and friends who at some point were all over the map musically, from experimental prog-rock to metal. The result of those influences colliding is a progressive-tinged blend of bluesy retro-rock that will rock your socks off.
“We love what we do, and all we can hope to be is some sort of reflection of documentation of the times we grew up in and the times we’ve experienced,” Melicia said.
At Friday’s show, they reflected what a true rock experience is: raucous, loud and fun. Every song contained some sort of extended jam section with speaker-shattering power chords and Sam Bey’s insanely hard drumming shaking the foundation of the building. The set was heavy on material from the group’s debut album, And You Were a Crow, created over a span of two months in the mountains of North Carolina with legendary producer Jacquire King.
The album sounds like what Led Zeppelin would be had they grown up with the bands and artists of the past two decades. The Parlor Mob is much more than a Zeppelin-influenced rock band, though.
“We take it as a great compliment to be compared to a band like that,” Melicia said. “At the same time, we’re completely our own thing. We’ve never had the intention of being a Zeppelin rip-off. The comparison is humbling, but we’re going to do things that they’d never do because we have influences they couldn’t have.”
But the band almost didn’t happen. After signing with Capitol Records and recording a four-song EP, the band found themselves neglected when Capitol merged with Virgin Records. They hired new representation and management and got out of the deal. Last summer, they signed to Roadrunner Records.
“Everything comes in a timely fashion now,” Melicia said. “Soon after we signed, we were doing a recording with a producer we believed in. They don’t try to mold us into what they want us to be.”
They’re more than capable of handling that responsibility. The highlight of Friday’s show was “When I Was an Orphan,” an epic track that starts with a bluesy acoustic guitar riff and builds upon itself until a minor-chord crescendo sends everything into a controlled chaos.
“We’ve always been able to rock and play hard, and you know, be arrogant,” Melicia said. “But we’d never been able to write something that was very vulnerable and emotional but still intense with fury. At times I thought we’d never be able to do that, but when we finally did it was mind-blowing to me.”
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