The Parlor Mob heads home

The Parlor Mob (Credit: Roadrunner Records)

With memories of Thanksgiving turkey still fresh in their minds and stomachs, Jersey rock fans will be hearing about another type of bird -- the crow -- when Monmouth County-based rockers the Parlor Mob bring their tour in support of their Roadrunner Records debut, this year's "And You Were a Crow," to the Wonder Bar in Asbury Park on Saturday (Nov. 29).

Parlor Mob drummer and Asbury Park resident Sam Bey recently spoke with Metromix Jersey Shore about forming the band with fellow Red Bank Regional graduate and guitarist Paul Ritchie.

When you first started playing with Paul in high school, did you guys have any intentions for how you wanted this band to sound, or was it more of a causal, hanging out thing?
It was very casual; we wanted to play music that we thought would be like really fun for us first and foremost, and then second of all something people would get a kick out of coming to see live. We had plans of playing shows and stuff like that, but our plans were more of like, "Let's go play shows and kind of try not to sound like anyone else that's playing shows around town right now and just kind of do what we thing is cool."

I don't know, it was a weird thing. I was a pretty young, and every show we'd go to, every band was either like a metal band or an emo, scremo kind of band. We were doing the daytime matinee shows at Chubby's (in Red Bank)  and stuff like that, so it was all like really kind of boring, what was going on.

The band's name refers to a 19^th century street gang, and it's a comparison that's been drawn by a lot of people over the years, how being in a rock band can feel like being in a gang.
Right.

What that part of the selection of the name?
Yeah, kind of. I mean, we definitely feel like we are like a gang together, and we just stick together that way; we're pretty much brothers. We feel that when the five of us walk into a room, or walk into a bar, or walk into anywhere it's like, "All right, those five guys are definitely together, they're like one unit."

And, the name also was cool because it was representative of where we're from -- the East Coast, New York City, New Jersey, this area as a whole, and it was kind of like drawing from that. We're kind of all fascinated by that period of time to begin with. The name's in the book "Gangs of New York," I don't think it's mentioned in the movie, and they were like a subsidiary gang of the Dead Rabbits from that time, and we just thought it was an overall cool kind of vibe, and those are a couple of different reasons we picked it.

You guys are part of a group of your bands around now with a very classic rock-influenced sound. Why do you think young bands are turning to those classic sounds?
I really don't know. Like, (with) Sikamor Rooney ... and our friend Scott Liss, the bands that are playing at the (Wonder Bar) with us, and Nicole Atkins, who's a good friend of ours,  I think that it's (that) New Jersey's so well-known for bands like Saves the Day and Lifetime, My Chemical Romance, and I think that everyone just kind of decided that we wanted to do something different. It's not that it was a conscious decision like, "Oh, let's all play this kind of music." That's just kind of what we're into and what we got into over the years.

Don't get me wrong: When I was younger, I liked to listen to that music, too, but I just kind of grew that way, started listening to Television and Fleetwood Mac or whatever. It just kind of went in the opposite direction than what happens here, and I think that tends to happen.

It's like kids whose parents are into one thing and they rebel and go the opposite way. They want to get into something completely different and have it as their own, so maybe that's what happened with us. You take this area and the music scene and the type of music people are playing -- that's kind of like our parents and we're the kids rebelling, doing something different.