Indie-pop Idealists

Like their idol Dan Deacon, Melbourne’s Parking Lot Experiments are hell-bent on creating communal, fun-loving pop. DOUG WALLEN speaks to founder Dan Connor and bassist Justin Shachter about the group’s inception, their idols and how they consider every gig a blessing.

As fairy godfathers go, you couldn’t hope for one better – or more enthusiastic – than Dan Deacon. On his recent visit to Melbourne for Summer Tones – Mistletone’s all-day festival at the Esplanade Hotel – the Baltimore party-starter made sure to catch little-known locals the Parking Lot Experiments. He then invited them to open for him at the Birmingham Hotel, where he proclaimed they were “fucking awesome as shit”. Suddenly, the young foursome, who could barely land a gig at a proper venue, were living out their rock’n’roll dreams.

“He’s one of our idols,” says bassist/keyboardist Justin “Shak” Shachter. “I noticed that he was playing at Summer Tones and we all got really excited. I decided to send him a message on Facebook. It had all these ridiculously silly jokes about dead pets and how he should see us because our pets are all dead. Just some really weird stuff.”

It turns out Deacon had already decided to see them after spotting a Summer Tones poster with the band’s name circled (by a friend). Thanks to Deacon’s subsequent shout-out and the plum slot at Summer Tones, The Parking Lot Experiments are a band on the rise. They’ve got a Tuesday residency at the Birmingham this month, which they’ve stocked with some likeminded young bands, and they just supported Aleks and the Ramps at their 7” launch last week at Anytime Place.

Named after a project conducted by The Flaming Lips, the band’s early incarnation featured the brothers Connor (Dave and Andrew), a cellist and a female singer. They were initially content to play shows in parks and public spaces until their dad advised them to “try harder”. Adding Shachter and multi-instrumentalist Lloyd Pratt to their ranks, they released a demo entitled Apartment: Home Recordings 05-09. Caught between gauzy electronics, tumbledown folk, and soft-sung pop, it feels casual and communal, with all four members singing and 11 players featured.

“We struggled for a long time with how to get intellectualization and a knotty abstract element and combine them with pop. [Before that] we didn’t bother. We just reveled in our own cleverness and it was thoroughly unlistenable.”

“We’ve been through a lot of directions,” admits Dave Connor. “We started out as a folk-pop thing and then as an experimental electronic band. We’ve really broached everything together.”

Once the Parking Lot Experiments landed Summer Tones, they penned a new batch of songs that were more energetic and pop-driven, changing direction yet again. The hi-hat-happy anthem “I’m Not Scared” – which gets a surprising amount of mileage out of that single repeated line – is already a live favourite. Of course, it helps that for now the band’s fan base consists mostly of loyal friends who smile and bounce around every bit as much as they do.

Your Summer Tones set was fun because so many of your friends were in the audience. Was that a one-time thing or are all your shows like that?
Dave Connor: Our friends are really great. They basically come to every show. They were there when the band started. It’s pretty fun for them to see us playing in an actual venue.

You seem to swap instruments fairly often. Have you always done that?
DC: Yeah, we’ve been doing that from the get go. And now that we have four people and a lot of instruments, it enables us to do whatever want to any given song.

Maybe it’s because I’m older and a bit jaded, but you seemed really young when I saw you play. How old are you all?
DC: We’re 21, 20, 19, and 18. Is Lloyd 18? He might be 19.

Justin Shachter: He just turned 19.

DC: There are other bands the same age as us who just act a lot more cool and mature, I guess.

JS: When we played with An Horse at the Northcote Social Club, we were all excited and everybody else was like “whatever”. We feel like little brats sometimes.

DC: At the moment, we are young. But even in five years or so, I think we’ll always seem young. We’re enamored with the whole idea of playing on stage for people. We desperately don’t want to become jaded or just used to it, because it’s really special.

How did you get the Summer Tones gig?
DC: Sophie [Best] and Ash [Miles] from Mistletone are legends, and basically they found our MySpace about a year ago. They just take chances on bands they think maybe have potential. We’d never spoken to them before and they just asked us to do it out of nowhere. We were genuinely honoured.

Why did you decide to cover the Grizzly Bear song ‘Alligator’?
JS: Grizzly Bear are just one of our favorite bands. And Dan Deacon we are [also] heavily influenced by. Maybe not so much our musical style, but we try to capture a lot of the energy he has. He’s got a sense of community around him.

DC: We struggled for a long time with how to get intellectualization and a knotty abstract element and combine them with pop. [Before that] we didn’t bother. We just reveled in our own cleverness and it was thoroughly unlistenable.

JS: We were being called “post-modern folk”. We didn’t know what to think of that.

DC: There’s a lot of that on [Apartment]. There’s a push-pull, which is not easily reconcilable, between [more abstract] music and pop.

Does everyone contribute to the songwriting process?
DC: These days everyone brings things to the table. The actual songs are written as a group entirely, except for the vocal melody, which I’ll do. And we try to do the lyrics together as well. It helps, if we’re shouting something, that we believe [in].

Tell me about your big crowd-pleaser, ‘I’m Not Scared’.
JS: It started at a house show. We played that song and when we finished [the set], everyone wanted to hear more. But we didn’t have any more songs to play, so someone was like, “Play that disco-sounding one.” We played that [again] and instantly that became the song everybody [loves].

DC: I thought a few times that we were going to add a few more lyrics, but that never happened. The version we have now is probably the best we’re going to get. We usually try to change all of our songs a fair bit, to tweak them and make them right. This song we played last night [May 5], it was our fourth version of it. We either drop the song or we keep trying to make it perfect for us.

With your friends in the audience and even on the bill at your shows, are you starting to feel that sense of community that you mentioned Dan Deacon has?
DC: Yeah. It’s really great to be part of the scene. We spent a lot of time on the outside looking in, and it’s nice to be in.

PARKING LOT EXPERIMENTS RESIDENCY

Tuesday, May 19
Birmingham Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
w/Milk Teddy + Great Earthquake + Maudita

Tuesday, May 26
Birmingham Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
w/Rat vs. Possum + Otouto + Twisted Ankles

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