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 Parquet Courts 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
The Fat Angel Sings 