JOY CROOKES

“IT’S NEVER TOO EARLY FOR A MIDLIFE CRISIS.”

- ANDREW SAVAGE

Court Order

Need a recap of Parquet’s catalogue so far? Here you go.

‘American Specialties’ (2011)

The band’s lo-fi debut was initially a cassetteonly release, mostly made up of one and two-minute guitar schisms laced with recorders, cheap synths and plenty of fuzz.

‘Light Up Gold’ (2012)

The schizophrenic garage rock of the band’s second studio album honed a winning formula, with tracks like ‘Borrowed Time’ and ‘Stoned and Starving’ fuelling their wider breakthrough.

‘Sunbathing Animal’ (2014)

LP3 was recorded at the Outlier Inn in the Catskills - the same studio used for ‘Sympathy For Life’. The title track exemplifies the kind of racket PC were becoming increasingly recognised for, as they continued to demonstrate a boundless energy.

‘Content Nausea’ (2014)

‘Content Nausea’ reimagined the four-piece as ‘Parkay Quarts’, since drummer Max Savage and bassist Sean Yeaton were largely absent this time round. Austin Brown and Andrew Savage recorded this selection of quick-and-to-thepoint punk songs on a fourtrack cassette in two weeks, with the finished package hitting shelves just six months after ‘Sunbathing Animal’.

‘Human Performance’ (2016)

Album Five took the band’s heart-racing art-punk into a more earnest realm, with the brooding title track among a number of highlights proving they were more than just a one trick pony.

‘Wide Awake!’

(2018)

The band’s most recent album was their first with an outside producer - Danger Mouse, of all people. A focused affair addressing real world traumas like racial violence (‘Violence’), that was simultaneously more joyful and humour-laced than any of their previous works. was crafted by “sending rototoms into a geodesic dome made out of triangles” (sure!) and making the drums “so layered we couldn’t really tell where the sounds were coming from” (OK!), ‘Plant Life’ is straight to the point. Built on drum shuffles, percussion and beats, it also boasts a lo-fi melodica organ that harks back to Gorillaz’s mercurial dub debut ‘Clint Eastwood’. Add in a disorientating, David Byrne-esque vocal and you’ve got Parquet Courts’ most Talking Heads moment to date.

It wasn’t just Austin’s crackpot dub antics and communal songcrafting vision that brought an experimental edge to proceedings, however. An essential creative tonic for Andrew Savage became even more of a catalyst. “It all started one day when I went to the gym on acid,” he begins, nonchalantly. “I just felt like, ‘I’m a fucking machine here, I’m killing it’.

“Something about the psychedelic experience gives you this mind over matter thing,” he continues of what he terms “trippy lifting”. The psychedelic psyche, he explains, puts physical exhaustion to the side, and enabled him to focus more intensely. “I not only have my wonderful physique to be thankful for, but it also started this songwriting process for me,” he jokes. “I guess it could be considered a performance-enhancing drug to some degree.”

Yet, for all the lunacy that fuelled the album’s composition, ‘Sympathy for Life’ still sounds undeniably like Parquet Courts. Take ‘Trullo’ or ’Walking at a Downtown Pace’. Each strut to the discreet kick-and-clap of a disco beat - the kind you might have heard at The Loft in the ‘80s. And yet both are decorated with enough percussive shuffles, noodling guitars and synths to disguise it almost entirely. The latter track’s swaggering bass line, meanwhile, is textbook PC, just as the elastic band guitars of ‘Just Shadows’ and the youngand-dumb garage rock of ‘Homo Sapien’ feel like familiar territory re-modelled. There’s a consistent lyrical theme for the band, too, as Andrew gladly confirms. “It’s kind of become a common denominator at this point.”

“We are living in late capitalism,” he carries on, passionately. “We are a product of it, and we benefit from it. Rock music [was] spawned from capitalism, [and] even at its most severe and underground iterations it is OF capitalism. I don’t see us any M uch like the band’s previous albums, then, a reactionary outlook remains at the heart of Parquet Courts’ work. Electronic jam ‘Marathon of Anger’, for example, places itself at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, with chants of “We’ve got the power, the streets are walking” calling out over gloomy bleeps and chugging bass. The cognitive dissonance between the words and the sounds speaks volumes of the struggle to achieve change.

The roaming ‘Just Shadows’, meanwhile, is about being unable to escape the global marketplace. It unfolds like a collection of warped haikus: “Amazon Fire, twenty percent off / Global cost, vast species death / Suggested for you.” It feels potent and charged. “As soon as you leave your apartment, it’s all around you,” Andrew rues of the invasiveness of consumer culture. “Advertisements, text, lights. We have this omnipresence of technology, and we’re always in it. It’s a very hard thing to escape.”

‘Application/Apparatus’, likewise, is delivered in an almost robotic rhythm, with lyrical soundbites referring to operating mechanisms, Bluetooth options and an “application, soothing like a mother’s voice”. It’s about the non-stop mechanism of living in a global city, Andrew notes, while ‘Homo Sapien’, conversely, is “your classic ‘everything fucking sucks’ punk song”.

“I think that all of our records are turning points,” he concludes of their latest, with its mind-boggling experiments, perception-altering experiences and socially conscious character. The sentiment is shared by his bandmate. “We’re finding that right line between our influence and our evolution,” Austin concludes. And on ‘Sympathy for Life’, the balance is right.

For Parquet Courts, then, the beat goes on. And as long as it does, the band will keep playing, too.

‘Sympathy For Life’ is out 22nd October via Rough Trade. DIY