Felix Sarco caps Parade Day with a CD release celebration.
By Alicia Grega-Pikul

Anyone who's experienced Scranton on St. Patrick's Day Parade Day is apt to assume a CD release party scheduled for that evening is some sort of logistical accident.  "Everybody's telling me, 'It's suicide. What are you doing?'" Felix Sarco band coordinator Gavin Robb said of the HighRise Productions show set to begin at 8 p.m. in the Scranton Cultural Center's Shopland Hall (aka The Red Room). "But we don't have a gigantic drinking crowd. We have a good mix of under age and over age, and I should hope for the best out of our fan base, that they don't get so annihilated they can't come out and enjoy their band.

Robb, whose spiritual twin Cromley Legussa sings at helm of Felix Sarco, has heard more about Parade Day than he's actually witnessed first hand, but he's seen enough to know.

"I remember I picked somebody up once and I had lots of people (screaming and howling) at the car. It was like something out of 'Night of the Living Dead.' There were zombies everywhere. Ahhhh!"

Promoted as an "an unjustified assault on the ears and the eyes," Saturday's show may wreak it's own kind of havoc on the day's notorious pandemonium. The band members plan to hit city streets during the day and recruit unsuspecting audience members from the parade crowd.

Felix Sarco's "Polar Power Manifesto Magnet Supernova" CD release celebration boasts an opening performance by the "strange and wonderful act" Heavens to Metroid of Baltimore and a new feature-length background video. Composed primarily by synth player C.C. Psychotica with some animation contributions from Robb, the video follows the journey of coverbird Percival the Peacock through politics.

"He meets Hitler, Jesus, Satan, everybody over the course of this film," Robb describd. "He runs into Charles Manson. He goes all over the place. Percival comes into contact with rabid dogs. It's really a good time."
"A lot of what goes on with the film is the synchronicity of us trying to get it to link up when none of us have seen the video. Chris (C.C. Psychotica) knows what's going on because he made the video but I never watch the videos and no one else who's playing does either."

The band's "full set" is expected to last an hour and a half.
"It's going to be seamless. Lots of jamming. We're going to go through all the songs on the album," Robb described.
Felix Sarco's self-titled, self-recorded, self-released CD includes nine tracks the band has been developing in live performance during the past two years.

"We just did everything that we have so far in our catalog. Some of them are two-minute pop tracks reminiscent of Michael Jackson, and then we've got three-minute heavy rock songs, and then we've got seven-minute, sprawling, reggae-jam/prog-rock songs.

"Nobody writes the songs and nobody ever tells anybody what the hell they're supposed to play. There's no f*ck you in the band," Robb said of Felix Sarco's songwriting process. "Somebody starts doing something, somebody else does something, and somebody nods. And somebody does something somebody doesn't like and nobody says anything; they just hope that they change it kind of secretly. We're free to create. ...
"There are no rules," he continued. "Just like with our live shows. We don't care how we're perceived or how we're looking, because we're just being what ever it is we're being at that exact moment. We're free to redefine ourselves at any minute as is every human being on the planet."

Produced at a cost of about $1.60 per disc, the band plans to sell each copy for only $2.
Said Robb: "Delusions of grandeur aside - we want our music to be seen and heard and experienced, and the best way to do that really is to give it to people for cheaper than beer."