Parlovr's 'Kook Soul' Album is a Diary of Heartbreak: 'Everything Was Falling Apart'

"Breakup" records are as much as part of the idiom of music culture as love songs. Weezer's Pinkerton is still a go-to for many in the mood to wallow in the abject misery of lost love. Parlovr's Alex Cooper, though disdainful of the term, acknowledges his band's new record Kook Soul fits into that paradigm.

"It's what gets categorized as a 'breakup' album in the taxonomy of rock journalism," Cooper tells Spinner.

The story of the stories that make up Kook Soul is heartbreaking, and yet Cooper talks about it freely and openly.

"I had been in love and living with my teenage love. We'd been together since I was 19. We were extremely, deeply in love for many years.

"Of course, the face of the relationship changed a lot. We grew up together. I had a [serious illness] about four years into our relationship, and started playing music, but she stayed with me, helped me. She, too, had all sorts of problems. The point is that we lived through our formative years together."

Cooper and his lady were "engaged to be married in October 2010," but alas, it wasn't to be. She had what Cooper describes as "crises of spirit," and, though he didn't know it at that point, those crises were the beginning of the end for the couple.

Kook Soul is a response to that heartbreak, a chronicle of sorts of what was happening in Cooper's heart and psyche. Parts of it literally ended up on the record.

"I helped her move into her place in Queens," said Cooper. "We parted out on the street and she was crying 'please don't forget about me.' This is a lyric in the track 'Do You Remember.'"

As Cooper was getting his heart broken and himself falling apart, Parlovr was crumbling around him, as well.

"Everything I wrote on this record was done in that time period," he said. "It's a very particular snapshot, and it was only when I started recording it that the real therapy of materializing it started to kick in, and it worked.

"At the same time, I realized that us as a band, we were falling apart, too. Everything was falling apart, and this record served as a rescue mission to get me and us -- on different levels -- out of some deep shit."

These days, the going's a little bit easier for both Cooper and the band. Kook Soul has been well-received and the band has been getting some good press, including a cover story in the Montréal Mirror and a feature in the Montréal Gazette. Still, there are some things that seem like they're going to be forever elusive for the ever-thoughtful, eternally conflicted (by his hopefulness) Cooper.

"I'm sick of rock 'n' roll," he says. "But I'm sick of everything else that's against it, too. 'Indie rock' has created a pretty strong reactionary movement, and while I feel equally repulsed by indie rock's mediocrity, I'm not really fully on board with the people who have tried to do something new."

Parlovr play Spinner AOL's free concert at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto at 2 p.m. on June. 16.

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