PARENTHETICAL GIRLS

If the PARENTHETICAL GIRLS have learned anything over the course of their almost unsettlingly unorthodox discography, it’s that they are just a pop group. Reduced to the core of singer/creative director Zac Pennington and producer/arranger Jherek Bischoff, “Privilege*” retains the band’s main ambitions–raw intimacy, affected rigor, and clear eloquence–while they engage in the perfect pop collage, which the previous records had aspired to but never quite achieved. “Privilege*” is a landslide of bleak details and gallows humor–a fearless treatise on privilege, tactlessness, betrayal, sex, and class politics. Originally published separately as a series of five extremely limited 12” EPs, “Privilege*” distills the 21 recordings from the original series to a single, twelve track, newly mixed, and newly mastered mission statement.