Ever since bluesman Robert Johnson struck a deal with the devil, there’s been a link between esoterica and rock’n’roll.
There was a revival of occultism in rock in the ’60s – take the arcana around The Beatles, for instance; rumour had it Paul McCartney was dead and you could make out John Lennon singing “I buried Paul” if you played ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ backwards. The ’70s had another crack: Bowie was at peak mysticism in his ‘Starman’ days and Led Zeppelin took to quoting occultist Aleister Crowley. In 2013, Ben Lee took a trip and made a concept album about it (Ayahuasca: Welcome To The Work), and now we’ve got Mantis and The Prayer, a Melbourne band that’s lifting the veil between our world and whatever the hell else is out there.
William Parmelee, AKA Mantis, is the band’s frontman and songwriter. Parmelee is gently spoken and has long vowels – in his mouth, the word ‘year’ has two syllables. He’s also the nexus of the goth blues outfit. Hailing from Long Island, New York, he has had incarnations of the band in the US, London and now here. Wherever he goes, he summons a band shortly thereafter.
“The Mantis and The Prayer – the essence of it – has always been my brainchild,” he says. “It’s always been something that I’ve taken with me, which has been evident in that I’ve been able to reassemble different versions of it, but I’m always the nucleus of it. I give the band its identity. God, that sounds narcissistic.”
Singing songs about transcendence, spirituality, magic, sex and death, Parmelee and co. weave sacred and profane themes into their tunes and stage shows. For instance, the shows debuting the band’s first full-length album, this year’s Butterflies & Demons, involved the kind of theatricality usually reserved for cock rock and metal – one of the singers burst through a chrysalis and grew wings, Hoops the drummer was horned, and Parmelee doused himself in fake blood. “Like the album, it’s a mix of blood and butterflies, light and dark,” Parmelee says.
The frontman feels his band meets a need for quirk and eccentricity. “There doesn’t seem to be a band around at the moment that exudes that sort of quality,” he says. “At essence that’s what we’re about – especially in the subject matter we sing about, with supernatural or fantasy themes. It’s a form of escapism.”
Parmelee’s got a low rumble of a voice, sitting somewhere in the register of Jack Ladder and Nick Cave. He’s often compared to the latter, although it turns out the likeness was unintentional. “Even when I first started writing songs, people were saying, ‘You sound like Nick Cave,’” he says. “I didn’t even know who Nick Cave was. I had no idea.”
At least consciously, Parmelee has drawn more influence from troubled troubadours like Jim Morrison, The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett. “Most of the stuff I listen to was being produced even before I was born,” he says. “There’s something in me that’s drawn to these artists who are a bit tragic – all these people who have fought personal and psychological problems. I don’t know what that says about me that I’m drawn to that.”
The word Mantis means ‘prophet’ in Greek, and ancient societies revered the bug of the same name as a necromancer, a soothsayer and minor god that would ferry lost souls to the underworld. Parmelee doesn’t object to these associations – after all, it was a semi-mystical experience that led him to the name in the first place. “I was home, looking into the mirror a bit too long and it was like my face had changed into a praying mantis face,” he says. Um, was he high at the time? “I don’t think so – I don’t recall that being part of it, but I can’t totally discount it.”
Mantis and The Prayer’sButterflies & Demonsisout independently on Monday August 15.
