The last time Parquet Courts filled Stubb’s Amphitheater with their brand of shouty, shuffle-punk pantomime – call it “human performance,” to borrow the name of the band’s best album – they were playing opening act for Ty Segall as part of the 2019 Levitation Festival.
Perhaps you remember Ty; he’s the basement-psych hobbyist whose entire musical-catalog wobbles back and forth between the same G and D major chords.
When the Courts returned Friday to headline, greeted by a diverse crowd who, God bless em, at least *attempted* to chant alongside Andrew Savage’s imposingly logorrheic lyrics, the significance was clear: across a field of strong competitors, Parquet Courts has emerged as the humble proletarian’s choice in intellectually obtuse monologue-rock.
Observing from the most undiscriminating angle, you could perceive last night – the final show of a sold out tour and homecoming for a group three-fourths composed of Texas expatriates – as the self-conscious climax to nearly a decade of mounting word of mouth, the four piece finally nodding towards their upward arc of underdog excellence and staking a claim as one of the 2010’s few inarguable big-ticket indie acts (alongside Big Thief, one of the last to hail from the once fruitful hipster harbor of Brooklyn). Viewed less charitably, one could also see a band in the throes of artistic uncertainty, belly-flopping on-stage following the chilly reception to their first album in three years – the proven Spotify hits careening into the low applause zone that followed nearly every new song.
Neither of these two broadly generalized straw-man caricatures bear much holistic resemblance to the reality of a crowd that was A) surprisingly rowdy, and B) at the very least always head-bobbingly engaged, but you can blame both on the thousands of new listeners brought on by the band’s last LP, 2018’s Wide Awake. For years, the incessant drum beating of the indie-press-industrial-complex had always seemed to outstrip the band’s own desire for a broader audience, so it was something of a shock to see the terminally rambling Courts tighten up for an album of slick ’n’ streamlined populist anthems (Wide Awake, woke, get it?) with no less a producer than legendary crossover svengali Danger Mouse— i.e. the dude that artists go to when they seek freedom from Pitchfork ghettoization; a man who can layer on studio hypergloss without troubling anybody’s cooler-than-thou aesthetic-detachment. And indeed, though the band incurred little loss in sarcasti-quirk signifying, gone were the thin, undernourished skronk-guitar lines of yore, and in their place came zany percussive doo-dads, whirring retro-synth accompaniment, and soaring choruses with relatively scrutable meanings! SCRUTABLE MEANINGS! Sell outs! Fake fans GET OUT.
But, of course, anybody who’d kept pace with the band’s many curveballs – starting when 2014’s deliberately barren, dada inflected Sunbathing Animal confounded the speed Pavement expectations set by 2013 debut Light Up Gold – knew this was merely the illusion of careerism: each new Parquet Courts album has draped their signature coffee shop deadpan in unique sonic furnishing. When the followup to Wide Awake inevitably shucked its Urban Outfitters atmospherics, it wouldn’t be because the band had tried and failed to maintain commercial momentum. And while many new fans did indeed reject October’s Sympathy for Life as a conspicuous slump, for everyone else it’s simply yet another swerve. Whether or not the album has been correctly identified as “not successful” well… that’s another story.
In interviews, the band has framed Sympathy for Life as their attempt at the increasingly omnipresent “post-pandemic dance album” – an ode to communal release and rising body temperatures in cramped, foul-smelling spaces – with primary groove influence taken from the nerd-funk no-wave of New York bands like DNA, Material, and, of course, Talking Heads (whose “Eighties white-guy” re-imagining of James Brown as stiff and robotic essentially emerged as direct reaction to the “Seventies white-guy” re-imagining of Sly Stone as scummy and lush – a sound recently plumed by St. Vincent for her 2021 left-turn Daddy’s Home).
The problem, as it hits my ears, is twofold.
1) This is still a band with a rhythmic sense built for speedy, sloppy indie rock. Though the Courts can certainly keep time with one another, giving them an edge on most bands who released an album on Matador in 1996, slowing down to a churning crawl primarily emphasizes their lack of instrumental precision without benefitting from the anxious-urgency of punk.
2) The chilly, antiseptic production, though well-suited to bleep-blooping synth’n’bass experiments (which, again, do not work), failed them on the tracks that built grooves from the band’s rockist fundamentals.
But with neither of these deficits having much to do with the songs themselves, it was easy to believe reports from the road that claimed the band’s latest material had come alive on stage, with audience butt-cheeks clapping as intended. With these hopeful expectations, Yours Truly came to Stubb’s.
For anybody in the audience unaware of Parquet Court’s latest sonic relocation, the band’s choice in supporting act immediately signaled their new residence in the late Jimmy Carter administration. Coming straight from the soundtrack to Tony Scott’s The Hunger was the 4/4 assault of NYC based slam-disco upstarts Public Practice. But with the presence of an opener perplexingly unannounced by either Stubb’s or LiveNation, murmurs of confusion arose at 8pm when lead singer Sam York authoritatively sashayed onto the stage – her light-refracting sequin shawl a galaxy removed from the khakis and turtlenecks most audience members had readied themselves for.
But you better believe those murmurs immediately died the fuck down once the band’s ferocious glam stomp took hold. Flanked by Drew Citron’s hard stepping bass-lines and the manic effects peddle toggling of Vince McClelland, York flung around the stage utterly possessed— her imposing, monotone vocals filling the space with exhilarating apathy. The best comparison I can offer is Grace Jones fronting Gang of Four— total stank face rhythmic badassery. When the band climatically revealed their name, finally answering the frustrated cries of “WHO ARE YOU?!?!” that had risen between each song, there was hardly a member of the audience who didn’t scramble for their phone.
And though danceable post-punk is hardly a fraught commodity in 2021, it was startling to see a band aspire to the coke-high heights of Eighties cool with so little irony or intellectual detachment, almost to the point of throwing unintentional shade on the night’s fussy, academic headliners.
Unfortunately, this impression was not immediately challenged when Parquet Courts crept unspectacularly onto a darkened stage shortly after 9pm and opened with perhaps the worst song on their new album – clattering, slowed down Suicide pastiche “Application/Apparatus.” Guitarist Austin Brown set what seemed a frightening standard for the night when, turning away from the audience, he put down his guitar to to twist knobs on a huge, Hal-9000 looking synth. Tellingly, the intermittent screeching feedback that resulted was not immediately identifiable as standoffish troll or amateurish lapse. Little friendlier to the ears was co-frontman Adam Savage’s totally devitalized post-modernist chant. Coming on like David Byrne reading his grocery list, he murmured in lockstep with a maddeningly mild groove that stagnated and stagnated and stagnated before ultimately building to… a slight tempo increase. Wooo.
Any doubt that these guys had forgotten how to pull six minutes of jam out of two chords was put climatically to rest by their absolutely sterling rendition of all-time munchies jam “Stoned and Starving,” topped off by yet another transition into “Light up Gold” so friggin cathartic I may have in fact screamed “Sean Yeaton daddy please.”
Though unquestionably the night’s weakest moment, the brief fear of an endlessly droning Parquet Courts show offered a necessary springboard into the night’s first great moment, as the lights switched on and the band launched into a high-energy medley bringing together the title track of their debut and “Walking at a Downtown Pace,” the cut from Sympathy To Life that most recalls those bohemia-punk origins.
If you weren’t suddenly tossed around by the friendly indie-kid mosh pit that opened on the floor, it was now possible to admire Parquet Courts’ highly endearing, if somewhat distant, stage presence. The mystically long-haired Brown – with his vaguely sarcastic hand-motions and general air of perpetual bemusement – comes closest to conventional audience engagement. Late in the show, warmly recalling a Stubb’s Parliament-Funkadelic concert that climaxed in teenage projectile vomiting, he unsurprisingly offered the night’s only, ahem, taste of stage banter.
Offering crew-cutted contrast is Adam Savage – the band’s defacto public face who nevertheless comes off as quite genuinely shy (whether or not he leans into it for branding is a matter of debate). Squeezed tight into a business casual collared shirt, he single-handily embodies the anxious urban thrum that is the sole constant of Parquet Court’s music, his tightly clenched stance occasional exploding into muscle-spasm awkward pigeon-step guitar charges. On the occasion Savage spoke into the mic, it was only ever to murmur song-titles or cordially address the audience as “guys and gals.” At one mystifying moment he flashed double peace signs with the unmistakable hunched body posture of a post-watergate Richard Nixon.
Compellingly quirky frontmen antics aside, it’d be hard for anybody to compete with the true center-stage star of every Parquet Courts show, and understandably so; there are few people on earth more fun to just observe than the band’s shaggy-haired, metal adjacent low-end Sean Yeaton, in part because the dude himself seems almost totally unconscious of even being observed. He spent much of Friday’s show swaying in yawned stoner reverie, pursing his lips and closing his eyes as though playing slap bass in Extreme, and at random intervals starling himself to yell inaudibly into. Just a delightful man.
But even without such an easy-to-love, misfit-bro dynamic, the band would have still insured necessary crowd support with the exhilarating first third of their setlist. New songs were temporarily put on hold as Human Performance and Wide Awake singalongs were burnt through with familiar zest, but also a new and frankly quite welcome-emphasis on groove that was clearly a carry-over from the latest album cycle.
But we were once again on unsteady ground when Brown and Savage discarded their stringed instruments (the latter picking up a truly goofy baby-blue melodica), an additional percussionist came to the stage, and the band “launched” (or rather, very gently disembarked) into the burbling ripple of “Plant Life.” For me, it was this song that clarified the limitation crippling Parquet Court’s attempt at intuitive rhythm-building (a conclusion that was then re-emphasized by the night’s other exploratory material, minimal-wave excursion “Marathon of Anger” and cod-funk jog-through-Lincoln-Park “Zoom Out”): there’s no shared center to build from. From Max Savage’s clompy drumming on down through Brown’s solipsistic keyboard doodling, each of these guys are conducting independent mad-science experiments and keeping their funky findings to themselves. Savage, inelegantly dribbling on chicken-scratch guitar riffing like a broken salt-shaker (I mean this positively?), probably adapts best to this new way of democratic jamming, but if you ask me, once a leftist punk band always a leftist punk band. Parquet Courts are best as a united coalition.
As foretold by internet prophecy, so it was that the more traditionally Courtsian (Parquetesque?) tunes left for dead on Sympathy to Life came roaring to life on stage. Freed from a mix that placed undue emphasis on individual instruments, it was finally possible to feel swept up in the surging methamphetamine pulse of “Homo Sapien” and marvel at the seamless punky-to-country swing on the lovely choruses to “Just Shadows.” And any doubt that these guys had forgotten how to pull six minutes of jam out of two chords was put climatically to rest by their absolutely sterling rendition of all-time munchies jam “Stoned and Starving,” topped off by yet another transition into “Light up Gold” so friggin cathartic I may have in fact screamed “Sean Yeaton daddy please.” Ironically, the night’s clear conclusion – this is a band who performs best on a tight leash – resounded strongest when the band made one last go at scratching their mellow-dub itch, finally achieving success through a cover of Silver Apples’s lonely capsule-ride to Jupiter, 1969 “I Have Known Love.” In adapting to the song’s Apollo-era electronic primitivism, the band were forced to cramp in on top of one another, finally bringing each member’s undisciplined boogie into lovably chaotic harmony. For their next album, I’d recommend everybody swap spit and shares Andrew Savage’s aforementioned bozo-ass melodica.
This article appears in November 19 • 2021.