Parquet Courts

One Liner: Brooklyn garage rock fully loved by the critics

Wikipedia Genre: Indie rock, post-punk revival, garage rock, art punk
Home: Denton, Texas, but Brooklyn for quite some time.

Poster Position: 12
Day: Sunday at 3:00
Both Weekends.

Thoughts: My old opinion of this band is that I'm not on board.  Critics freaking love these dudes.  That Sunbathing Animal album from 2014 made all the indie rock critics cream their jeans and freak out, but to me, it just got monotonous, Strokes-ian garage rock, all sloppy and cool and raw and punky.  If you were a real rock and roller, then you apparently loved it.  I did not, and it honestly bothered me.  The top track from that album, at a surprisingly low 2.3 million streams, is "Black and White."

That post-punk method of singing by hitting one note and kind of chanting your way through the lyrics - its never sat that well with me.  I want some harmonies or at least some variation.  And something about their lackadaisical, hip singing bugged me.  Like, they're so freaking cool they can't even fully form words.  So, I never got on the Parquet bandwagon.

Pitchfork says "Sunbathing Animal's considered, whip-smart rock revivalism is a work of substantial growth from a band that already did "simple" quite well, placing Parquet Courts in their own distinct weight class."  Rolling Stone gives it four out of five stars, and like Pitchfork, invokes Pavement as the closest comparison, in saying it has deadpan vocals and fantastic guitar rambles.  Yeah, so "deadpan vocals" is the term for monotone and boring?  They were SPIN magazine's 2014 band of the year, saying "Noisy, clever, and uncompromising, Parquet Courts have experienced an ascent few young rock bands could ever plan" and "they’ve become one of the most vital and refreshing rock bands on the planet, an outfit capable of illuminating an art form that many could (and do) consider dead or outdated."  THEY WILL SAVE ROCK AND ROLL, MAN!!!

On top of the critical love, their story also felt super cool and hip.  The dudes met at the University of North Texas, at an on-campus club named Knights of the Round Turntable, where they would play records for each other and talk music.  They tried music and it didn't take, but then they ran into each other again in Brooklyn and magic happened.

Their initial album is 2013's Light Up Gold (which on Spotify is joined with Tally All the Things That You Broke), which at times gives me an LCD Soundsystem vibe on top of the Strokes sound.  The top track from that album is more of the same, hip and chilled and talking about being stoned.  "Stoned and Starving" has 3.9 million streams.

Monastic Living came out in 2015, and is truly awful.  About halfway through the second song, I realized that I wanted to die because of my ears telling me that it was time for death, so I started fast forwarding all of these songs.  They are all just sucky, loud, distorted guitar freakouts.  F that.  "Elegy of Colonial Suffering" will seriously make you insane.  Content Nausea also came out in 2015, and it is better than Moastic Living by a million miles, and has a kind of odd cover of Nancy Sinatra's "Boots are Made for Walkin'."  2016's Human Performance makes me think of Lou Reed and Velvet Underground multiple times.  And that album has their most streamed song as well, the title track to the disc, with 4.5 million streams.

Oh dear God.  Sweet baby Jesus in your golden crib, please wipe that terrifying shit from my mind forever.  On the one hand, some of those puppeteers are amazing.  On the other hand, I just watched puppets do horrifying things and I need to die.

Then, comes the new album, 2018's Wide Awake! which I think is the best album of the group.  A cleaner, more robust sound, with echoes of everyone from LCD Soundsystem ("Wide Awake") to Elvis Costello ("Freebird II") to David Bowie ("Tenderness") to a relaxed version of the Strokes (see in particular "Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience").  Apparently Danger Mouse came in to give them a real producer for the first time, and you can tell.  Its much more tuneful, and I like it so very much more than the early stuff.  "Total Football," with just over 800k streams in just over a month, is the current most popular track.

Live version at KUTX here in Austin.  Odd closing line of "Fuck Tom Brady!"  I went and dug around to see what the deal is with that:

What’s your beef with Tom Brady?
Savage: It’s less about him as a person. I don’t hate Tom Brady as an individual. He, in the context of that song, is an archetype for something that is becoming a bit tired in that people are starting to reject. There’s ‘Tom Brady the player’ which is unpopular because he plays for the New England Patriots which is like a powerhouse team but then there’s ‘Tom Brady the symbol’, which is what I’m talking about. The lone wolf, alpha male, quarterback idea of traditional independent American masculinity that we are all rejecting in that song. It’s Tom Brady the concept. Every sport has their Tom Brady; every civilization has their Tom Brady.

Mmmkay.  All but one of their currently most popular songs is from this new album, and for good reason, I think.  It is very good stuff.  I'll toss one more at you, the title track from the new album, "Wide Awake."  Has 1.5 million streams.

Yeah, baby.  This is the final distillation of the Talking Heads down through LCD Soundsystem to get to this final liquor.  Fun and funky and give me some more.