I have to tell you, it gets difficult to find anything online about a new band called “Overnight Parking”, especially when that band is from Long Island. You get a lot of noise about violation codes and fines and winter weather restrictions, but nothing about music. Up yours, New York State Department of Transporation!
Anyway, Overnight Parking are a new art-emo band from Lynbrook, a village just about twenty minutes east from Queens (or forty minutes if traffic sucks on the Belt Parkway, or if the LIRR gets held up for whatever reason.) Their new single “Mercy Might Martyr Me” represents two years of playing together in garages and basements to find their sound, a selection of noise and distressed melody that rumbles against the walls and rattles the rest of the house, if not the whole neighborhood.
The band says they recorded “Mercy Might Martyr Me” in their basement on a Tascam 388, a vintage piece of technology combining an eight-channel mixer with a 1/4″ eight-track reel-to-reel tape deck. Therefore, while the music sounds like modern-day post-rock emo, the instruments snap with raw analog energy, the passion of the music going right from the vocal cords and fingers onto the magnetic tape, through the speaker, and against your eardrums. The music carries the only two lines of lyrics that repeat throughout the song: “What would even make it better? What would even be better?”
This is the sound of a band starting to get the word out there about themselves, making enough noise to cross the border into the Five Boroughs. After playing a handful of shows within Nassau County, they’ll play at the legendary Pianos in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a venue which has seen many startup bands come through its doors. Lynbrook may be home for Overnight Parking, but they’re ready to break out of the basement and take on the city, and quite possibly the entire world.
Take a listen to “Mercy Might Martyr Me” below.
[ADD MUSIC!]
Written by Will Sisskind
