Parasites

Reviews

Parasites EP​-​Onymous EP

If your girlfriend is in the market for some fast-paced pop punk themed with rockabilly romance, EP-Onymous is perfect for your sweetheart. Midwest punks know how to love; the PARASITES prove this with their passionate five-song EP. Serenading us with a sort of lived-in recording quality and boy band-ish charm, this release is a short burst of electricity bringing to mind the RAMONES as source material. Singing about a girl (or many), the catharsis of this EP stems from a mix of lyrics centered on heartbreak and loving redemption, backtracked by repeating riffs and semi-muted drums. “I Love Her, But She Don’t Surf” is a classic, and the incorporated tambourine in “Love Me Too” is always appreciated (other bands, take notes). The type of album you find buried in a former punk’s garage sale, EP-Onymous is just, well, good: not overly pleasing nor underwhelming, a precious staple in the Chicago scene.

Parasites Retro-Pop Remasters LP

PARASITES are a band that, for some reason, never checked all the boxes with me when it came to their brand of pop punk. Unlike so many of their more contemporaries, they just seemed to lack something. Maybe it was that they’re a bit more complex than the average “1-2-3-4 woah-oh!” RAMONES-worshiping pop punkers. Listening to the reissue of this collection, I’m now realizing that maybe I should have had a bit more of an open ear to, at the very least, this album. More in line with, say, a band like WESTON than the QUEERS, these are straight-up pretty decent hard-edged pop songs. Maybe you subscribe to the aforementioned opinion given in the first two sentences of this review. If so, perhaps go ahead and give this a second spin. I do want to go on record and let it be known that I believe “Hang Up” is one of the best songs ever written, though.