Parquet Courts are an American punk rock band based in Brooklyn, NY that formed in late 2010. The band consists of Andrew Savage (lead vocals, guitar), Austin Brown (guitar), Sean Yeaton (bass), and Andrew’s brother Max Savage (drums).
The band released their debut album, American Specialties, on a limited cassette release (later released on LP by Play Pinball! Records). This was followed by the full length album Light Up Gold (2012), which was initially released on Savage’s Dull Tools label and later reissued on What’s Your Rupture? in 2013. Light Up Gold received acclaim in both the DIY underground and mainstream indie rock press.
Feels like a long time ago now that we were blessed with Parquet Courts’ brilliant album Human Performance. Anyone with a brain loved it and has likely since enjoyed every single and video release, with their quirky and individual style permeating their output.
‘Outside’ fits the same sort of bill. Using live footage the band show not only their effortless stage performance but their warmth for their fans and humbleness at actually being allowed to play music for a living. The video is less than 2 minutes long but still manages to showcase their recent gig at the Knockdown Center in New York.
Frenzy and family, it always feels like if you’re part of the Parquet Courts gang then you’re there for life .
Taken from Parquet Courts’ excellent album ‘Human Performance’, out now on Rough Trade Records: The band have made themselves even more adored amongst music journalists as they have put out one of the best videos of the year for their recent song ‘Human Performance’.
Taken from the album of the same name the band use some slightly odd puppets to create a very odd visual to their brilliant song. It feels perfect as the distant between humans and their performance become blurred with every note. The heartfelt nature of the song feels eloquently placed in this video.
But it’s not all for fun the band “I was thinking about the track and how it paints a break-up both elliptically and with such devastating directness,” says the clip’s director, Phil Collins (nope). ”And I wondered what it would be like if this drama was enacted not through naturalism or authenticity but through its partners in crime, doubling and artificiality. So puppets seemed an obvious choice.
“A puppet is a complex beast, animated by a human but which also, conversely, brings the puppeteer to life. I thought this kind of dialectics could work well with Andrew’s lyrics, and also found it funny to give starring roles to puppets in a track called ‘Human Performance’.”
A “Performing Human” 12″ is available to buy now from the Rough Trade Records
Punk rock has always prided itself on speaking truth to power. Austin Brown, one of Parquet Courts’ two singer-guitarists is no different. It’s hard to explain exactly why Parquet Courts are so great, because on paper, they don’t sound that exciting. So it’s a testament to their immense talent that they really are that exciting. On Human Performance, they take all the anxiety and ennui of modern existence, add in a healthy dose of personal heartbreak, and turn it into whip-smart, hugely satisfying rock songs. Some of the ramshackle punk energy of Sunbathing Animal is gone, but it’s replaced by a world-weariness and a tight musicianship that can’t be beat, plus some of the most immediately appealing songs of their career
It is also an angry album. The song Two Dead Cops deals with an incident that happened in the Brooklyn neighbourhood Savage lives in, when two police officers were shot dead. “When shots are heard young lives are lost/ Nobody cries in the ghetto for two dead cops,” Savage sings. He is not being disrespectful, he says; it is completely appropriate that people do mourn the deaths of police officers, “but we don’t spend much time talking about the social sickness and relationship with violence we have, and how violence is so specifically directed at poor people and non-whites; and, living in Brooklyn, it’s something you can’t not notice.”
Bassist Sean Yeaton chips in: “My mom had plans to go to a movie with her boyfriend. I was on the phone with her, and asked how the movie was. She said she didn’t go because she was afraid of getting shot in the movie theatre. Not in a paranoid way; it was as if she was asking for a glass of water. As if the possibility was so great. It was so weird and dark.”
Two Dead Cops is a taut and thrilling song, the kind of burst of anger the underground has always thrived on. The kind of song that, once upon a time, set musical agendas.
Parquet Courts are a band of sloppily-dressed white dudes who play pointed, angular guitar rock and whose sung-spoken lyrics are written from a wry, erudite, and sometimes detached point of view. So that means they will always have to deal with the Pavement comparison. It’s just a thing that happens. As someone who really likes ParquetCourts and can’t stand Pavement, And so their brand new album “Human Performance” is the moment that comparison finally goes away. It won’t, but it should. After all, Pavement, lyrically, were about referential inside-joke opacity. Parquet Courts, historically, have had some of that in them, too. But Human Performance is the moment where they jump to another level, where they find powerful and particular ways to express weirdly universal sentiments that you don’t often hear in music. For that reason alone, they’re already as close to, say, the Modern Lovers as they ever were to Pavement. Consider, for example, “Berlin Got Blurry,” the best of the early songs that the band released from the album and maybe just straight-up the best song on the album. It’s a song about wandering by yourself in a foreign country, seizing onto the weird little cultural differences rather than the big and obvious ones, feeling more alone that you’ve ever felt. Frontman Andrew Savage, in that flat and bored deadpan, sings the entire thing in second person, Bright Lights, Big City-style. And he nails the feeling of floating unmoored through the world: “Cell phone service, it’s not that expensive / But that takes commitment, and you just don’t have it / Feels so effortless to be a stranger / But feeling foreign’s such a lonely habit.” It’s a song about a specific circumstance I’ve never experienced; I’ve never even been to Berlin. But there’s a feeling it evokes.
It goes on from there. Parquet Courts’ great subject might be the way living in big late-capitalist cities can turn existential stress into straight-up dread, and that’s here: “Skull-shaking cadence of the J train rolls / The rhythm of defeat, repeating like a pulse.” There’s even one song, “Two Dead Cops,” about rabid distrust for police, about fantasies of finding evidence planted on you, and about not even feeling bad when they get murdered: “Nobody cries in the ghetto for two dead cops.” More than that, though, Human Performance seems to be a breakup album, an album about figuring out who you are when your life gets turned upside-down: “Ashtray is full, bottle is empty / No music plays and nothing moves without drifting into a memory.” This is a time-honored subject, but Parquet Courts consistently find fresh, sideways perspectives on it, even when it comes to something as simple as the physical discomfort that so often accompanies heartache and confusion: “My eyes feel like cigarette burns.”
But if there’s doubt and dread in the lyrics, there’s none in the music. Parquet Courts have always tended to knock their records out in a week or two, but they spent a full year on this one, recording in a few different studios in a few different states — including Wilco’s Chicago loft, where Jeff Tweedy added some extra guitar to a couple of songs. Still, this is the most effortless they’ve ever sounded. If you listen to Light Up Gold and Human Performance back-to-back, it’s almost enough to give you whiplash. They’ve toured hard, constantly, and they’ve got that road-honed sense of interplay. They pull off new tricks, like the twangy Duane Eddy guitar line on “Berlin Got Blurry,” content in the knowledge that they’re totally going to pull it off. They don’t sound like a young rock band anymore. They sound like a rock band who have figured out what the fuck they’re doing.
Taken from Parquet Courts’ new album ‘Human Performance’, out 8th April 2016 on Rough Trade Records
Parquet Courts have released “Berlin Got Blury,” the second upcoming single from their forthcoming album Human Performance. A tale of existential dread in a foreign city, it’s also one of the catchiest songs they’ve ever done. The song’s video, directed by Claes Nordwall, was shot in Berlin with singer Andrew Savage struggling with loneliness, German pay phones and giant shawarma. Savage says this about it:
“Berlin Got Blurry” is a song about saying goodbye to someone from the other side of the world and about feeling completely foreign to your environment; knowing you can’t go home, but not knowing where you belong. I wrote the song in Berlin, so it made sense to try to recreate my experience for the video. It was shot on 16mm by the wonderful, talented and patient Claes Nordwall, who was able to take my very loose concept and make it into something really beautiful.
Most videos these days seem like an afterthought but “Berlin Got Blurry” is worth your three minutes and change
Brooklyn quartet Parquet Courts depict the aforementioned “foggy drudgery” of desk life in their video for krautrock chugger “Dust.” Directed by Johann Rashid, the sepia-hued clip is nothing short of Kafkaesque, featuring an office drone being haunted by an anthropomorphic dust mite.
Their Album Human Performance was released in April and the fifth album from American Punk-Rock band Parquet Courts. Dust arrived in February and was the lead single from the L.P. A perfect way to kick the album off: Dust is drone-like but has plenty of determination and spirit; its chorus is instantly catchy and memorable and the band performance is completely tight and compelling throughout. Backed by rich and clear production values and you cannot fault the multiple layers and nuances of Dust. The rest of Human Performance switches between goofy Pop and addressing gun violence in the U.S. and proves what a nimble and far-reaching band Parquet Courts are.
“Dust” is taken from Parquet Courts’ new album ‘Human Performance’, out 8th April 2016 on Rough Trade Records.
It’s been a quiet year in terms of release for the Brooklyn quartet, who released two records in 2014 (one under the pseudonym Parkay Quarts). To make up for that, they’ll release a tidbit of new music with their last EP only a few months old, in the form of a EP called ‘Monastic Living’.
Parquet Courts performs “Dust” live in Studio A. Recorded 13/01/2016. Yesterday we speculated over whether or not Parquet Courts would be releasing a full-length in the coming months after a mural featuring what looked like new album artwork surfaced in Brooklyn, and today that suspicion has been confirmed. The Brooklyn-based band performed new songs on WFUV, and their host Carmel Holt announced that the new LP, Human Performance will be out this spring. Watch the band perform “Dust” and “Outside” below, and listen to their full WFUV session
In other news: A mural recently went up in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood teasing what appears to be a new Parquet Courts release called Human Performance. Below, watch a making-of the mural posted to Instagram by Rough Trade, the band’s label.
The Fat Angel Sings 