Seven albums in, Parquet Courts is one of the more fascinating tales of creative duality: two lead vocalists; dual homes of Denton, TX, and NYC; and from the very beginning, equally likely to hit you with a one-minute blitz of a wordy punk song as they are to summon the more patient cadence of The Velvet Underground. Co-leads Andrew Savage and Austin Brown met in a music club in college in Denton, and the band’s willingness to bring in any number of influences likely owes to that kind of experimental, collaborative sharing of ideas. Andrew’s brother Max moved with them to New York after school to be the band’s drummer, and ever since then, they’ve drawn on the musical traditions of both the city and the south, coming together in a sound that, no matter where it goes, feels new and vital while also having a kind of wizened quality that lifelong fans of funk, blues, and art rock can instantly recognize. There’s stuff they make to this day that calls back to Savage’s earlier bands like Teenage Cool Kids, but also a varied palate of other influences that surface and have only grown wider-ranging as they’ve aged.
The band arrives to eager faces at Boston’s Royale club, and with good reason – this is a show that they’ve been trying to put on for two years. It’s also notably a hometown-ish gig for bassist Sean Yeaton, who hails from nearby Beverly. Of the four, he’s easily the most animated and gregarious, and very early on asks with a smile, “Did I go to high school with anyone here?” before shouting out his native north shore. It’s Yeaton’s bassline that starts off the first song of the night, ‘Application/Apparatus’, as well as a programmed synth crack that comes down regularly, almost like a heartbeat flickering across a monitor. It’s from the band’s newest record, Sympathy for Life, and in many ways, it’s a perfect encapsulation of a Parquet Courts song. It starts very personal in scope about a driver’s relationship to, and struggles with, technology – feeling closer to the motherly voice in the GPS than he does to his human clientele having their own conversation in the back seat. But by the end it’s become a truly existential rumination on gentrification, as well as the way the entirety of a person’s humanity is reduced to a function for eight hours a day, bifurcating their life in an unnatural way.
This anxiousness about the influence of technology is a frequent lyrical touchstone for Savage in particular, who declared on 2014’s Content Nausea that “life is best when scrolling least,” and it’s something the band has clearly opted to stick to, with virtually no social media presence of which to speak. That quote, taken from the record’s frantic title track, is also preceded by a break where Savage describes another character caught in monotony, doing the exact same thing every day, “stoop to stairwell/cognizance to coma.” This anthropological angle is particularly unavoidable for residents of New York, where the cost of living rises ever higher, gig economy workers are all around, and simply existing can reduce one’s life to a treadmill, all those treadmills stacked atop each other in luxury apartments. This disdain for certain aspects of their adopted home goes back even further, Brown putting it most mockingly of all in ‘Master of My Craft’, whose iconic lines would only be dulled by writing them out here.
Another, more personal vignette of daily life comes early in the night in the form of ‘Almost Had to Start a Fight / In and Out of Patience’. The first movement is pure panic, Savage repeating sentence fragments over staccato guitars multiple times before finishing each line. This gives way to a groovier second act focusing on a different person or circumstance, but similarly on the last dregs of their sanity. The song that comes next both in-person and on the record, ‘Freebird II’, is a ponderous one where Savage looks back on his upbringing, specifically to his mother who seems to have been absent and struggling with addiction during his youth. But his realization that he’s come to follow some of her patterns engenders the song with a sort of softness and empathy.
Next comes the mellow groove of ‘Marathon of Anger’, and while the lights are low as is the bpm of the song, the subject matter is anything but trivial. Written in response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and beyond, the song is a call to action, to transcend institutions in favor of true community. This type of slower and glitchier instrumentation is, broadly speaking, Brown’s forte of late. Savage still favors the directness of the guitar in many cases, but especially since Wide Awake! In 2018 Brown has been creating ever-more spaced-out synthscapes, like in ‘Back to Earth’ and the title track ‘Sympathy for Life’. There are no hard rules about what a Parquet Courts song must be, and this stylistic push and pull within each album leads to a very balanced listening experience and a wide breadth of tones to pull from across the night. Another perfect example of this dynamic from Boston is how, after the hypnotic ‘Plant Life’ which sees Savage playing a melodica, what seems to be a bit of a lull in the night turns into a full-on triple threat with the brief-but-thrilling ‘Light-Up Gold II’, the churn of ‘Homo Sapien’, and the angular patterns of ‘Paraphrased’.
Towards the end of the night, both Brown and Savage address the audience. Brown remembers how last time they were in Boston they had one obnoxious heckler in the crowd, but he laughs it off, remarking, “They say living well is the best revenge,” before quickly adding, “I don’t know about ‘well,’ but…” and trailing off to the laughter of the crowd. After ‘Mardi Gras Beads’ Savage leans into the mic and jokes after glancing around the room, “This is the encore,” and gives a smile. The band doesn’t leave the stage, instead, they start right up with ‘Stoned and Starving’, a song from their sophomore record that has long endured as a fan favorite. They extend it greatly, and in the lengthy outro, Brown raises his guitar above his head and brings it down with force, not breaking it, but drawing strange sounds from the vibrations throughout the instrument’s body. Then he carts it over to his amp and smacks the neck there a couple of times, before finally bending the thing over top of the amplifier, all creating bizarre and unique noises as everyone else riffs onward. Savage is thrashing around, back to the crowd. Someone’s shoe is off out there, a silhouette of sole and laces against the bright lights of the stage. Some crowd surfers go across the horizon, and the night has reached its penultimate song with an all-out party. As intellectual as Parquet Courts can be, they’re living proof that sometimes you also just need a song about walking through Queens with the munchies.
Before they depart, the band closes with ‘Pulcinella’, also the final track from Sympathy for Life. It finds Savage seemingly considering the trajectory of his life as a whole and the power of memory, thinking about people with whom he’s lost touch and the intricacies of relationships. It’s a slower, pensive ending to the night, a gentle comedown after what came previously. The band may leave the stage, but there already seems to be new music on the horizon as well, like ‘Watching Strangers Smile’ which finds Savage behind his Omnichord, a rare but exquisite instrument. The title of that song also perfectly encapsulates much of Parquet Courts’ music – it’s observational, anthropological, but definitely not accompanied by the passivity those perspectives can sometimes demand. The band’s heart, collaborative spirit, instruments, and words all gel together to make music that examines the human condition on all scales, lending visibility and urgency at every turn.
Review and Photos by Collin Heroux
