Parquet Courts

arquet Courts recorded Light Up Gold in their practice space over the course of three days, writing nearly half of the record’s songs in the process. When Savage released the record on his own Dull Tools imprint, expectations were modest. (“We expected to sell it on tour,” Brown says.) But when it was reissued by What’s Your Rupture?/Mom + Pop in January 2013, breathless reviews began to roll in from bigger and bigger outlets. No grander a name than Rolling Stone MOST FREEDOM IS DECEIVING would eventually call album standout “Stoned and Starving” the sixth-best song of 2013, and a month or so later, the band would play the track on Late Night with BY MARTY SARTINI GARNER Jimmy Fallon. “Stoned and Starving” lurches forward on rails of interlockin’ krautrock, PHOTOS BY SAMANTHA YORKE with the guitarists trading start-stop leads. An empty-eyed Savage wanders through Ridgewood, Queens, in search of a well-stocked bodega. “I was debating Swedish fish/Roasted peanuts and licorice/I was so stoned and starving,” he sings. But he’s not smacking his lips and contemplating snacks; he’s lamenting the kind of life that spends so much time and energy wandering around with undirected and undefined desire. There’s a hollowness at the song’s center, and though Brown and Savage’s fretwork takes center stage, the guitars feel skinny and underfed, far from the robust and muscular pulls you’d expect from a five- minute workout. It’s a soul song for people who no longer believe in souls. “There was a rather easy narrative that was drawn,” Brown says of the song’s critical reaction. “Not by everyone, but a lot of the blurb writers out there that could take a song like ‘Stoned and Starving’ and make fairly easily musical comparisons. It’s a song that on the surface could be about having the munchies, and you’re like, ‘Alright, stoner/slacker-rock, check the box, got it, publish it, tweet it, like me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter.’” The slacker tag proved especially ndrew Savage chooses his words carefully. And when he finally decides on what to say and the best, most direct way to say it, he difficult to shake, along with all of that term’s attendant ideas—particularly those says it eloquently and in earnest. of ’90s revivalism and purposeful dumbness. Savage put together a list of quotes “Obviously, Parquet Courts have been very successful and I’m super happy about that, and I don’t want to be one of those guys who pulled from various reviews of Light Up Gold that featured the word “slacker” garners some success and then complains about it. But there’s a way of—” He pauses, sorts his thoughts, and continues. “The way that I or “’90s” or “stoners” and posted it on the band’s blog. “Hype can often be fatal grew up thinking about music in some ways is very different from the way that music works on a business scale in the pop arena, which is to new bands,” one ironically began, “but New York slacker-rock four-piece what I consider Parquet Courts to be in. You can call it indie-rock or alternative-rock or whatever you want, but we’re reviewed on the same Parquet Courts are probably too stoned to care.” websites that review Drake and Rihanna, you know? There are a lot of little associations like that that I don’t really care for, and I think So when Savage worries about the way that his band are received, it’s that there are certain implications of being in that world versus the world that we came from that maybe imply that we’re a different band hard not to blame him. And as they’ve found themselves wrenched from their now. Because, really, we are, but at our core we have the same message and the same concept of being a band we’ve had since our inception.” homegrown surroundings and slotted into a broader picture, Parquet Courts Call it hubris if you want, call him a rockist, but Savage isn’t wrong. Parquet Courts, the band he co-fronts with Austin Brown, made have worked to maintain their ties to the crucible in which they were formed. their bones in the sorta-legal Brooklyn DIY scene, playing venues like Death By Audio, Glasslands and The Acheron alongside bands Rather than celebrate the release of Sunbathing Animal with a blowout show at like The Beets, The Dreebs and PC Worship. Now, less than a year and a half after releasing their debut album, Light Up Gold, they find some massive Manhattan venue, they worked with the promoters of the recently themselves playing late-night TV shows and being written about in foreign newspapers. It’s heady, sure, but lost in the band’s strange and shuttered DIY space 285 Kent to book the Sugar Hill Supper Club, a soul-food sudden ascent (or what Savage refers to as their popularity having seemed “to go up at a very acute angle very quickly”) was the nuance and restaurant and bar in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, with mirrored walls and high-pile sense of artistry that made Light Up Gold a masterpiece of medium-fi big-city ennui. It’s not about Drake and Rihanna; it’s about the apparent carpet. And instead of enjoying some hard-earned time at their families’ homes inability for art to be understood through the lens of celebrity, and the importance of context in the de-contextualized entertainment arena. in Texas during this year’s SXSW, they used their performance guarantee to book With the lyrically dense, sonically wild new album Sunbathing Animal, Savage and Brown—along with bassist Sean Yeaton and Savage’s their own show at Austin’s east side basement space The Owl, where they invited drummer brother Max—are prepared to face a world that’s much larger and stranger than the one that received their debut. their scene cohort to play. In a sign of the group’s suddenly dualist identity, Rolling Stone called it SXSW’s best secret show. FILTER . 83 And those lyrics are tightly wound, begging for repeat spins and deep explication in a way that recalls “It’s Alright, Ma "IT'S NOT OUR MISSION TO PROVE ANYTHING, (I’m Only Bleeding)” more than “Rise Above.” Savage, who says he writes “indiscriminately” and doesn’t worry about whether BUT IT'S A BUMMER TO BE MISUNDERSTOOD." what he’s writing at the moment is a song or not, scrolls through “We were spending a lot of time on the road,” Brown a series of petitions that are both personal and philosophical. says about the creation of Sunbathing Animal, “and I think —aUSTIN BROWN The singer finds himself pulled between the feeling of “the in that way it’s hard to feel those roots that you need to feel bosom of 1,000 watts” he gets when he’s with his love and the human. Expectations were being built up for us that maybe longing for perfect self-definition—and even that is qualified: we had for ourselves. They’re tough emotions to grapple with, “ “Most freedom is deceiving/If such a thing exists,” go the second especially when you’re spending so much time away from n important part of doing something new is knowing verse’s opening lines. A few moments later, when he caps the your home and you’re feeling a bit uprooted and imprisoned where you come from and gleaning what you can from the verse with a deeply interwoven five-line metaphor punctuated by your obligations to something that is your passion and past and making it new and interesting again,” Savage says. by internal rhyme, he comes off like GZA in skinny jeans with your art.” There’s a tiny, cough-and-you’ll-miss-it trace of That pull between the confining definitions of what has been an identity crisis. Savage says that the song addresses “the idea accent that betrays his Beaumont, Texas, upbringing. It colors The reductionist reading of Parquet Courts—stoopid revivalists, and the desire to have complete and total autonomy over the of obsession, the idea of being really fixated on something and Brown’s speaking voice the same way a subtle twang colors better at imitating Pavement than Pavement were at imitating The self is, not surprisingly, at the center of Sunbathing Animal. maybe even feeling like this thing makes you feel really happy his band’s music. Neither are present in his gentle, meditative Fall—is both perfectly understandable and incredibly unfair. There As with Light Up Gold, both Savage and Brown wrote their and makes you feel really free, but what’s really happening is “Into the Garden,” which closes Sunbathing Animal. Unlike his are plenty of well-rehearsed reasons—technological, sociological and lyrics before composing any music, and the mix puts both you’re completely captive to this thing… You’re lying out in the bandmate, Brown is economical with his words, and he allows theological—why our culture has found itself in the grip of nostalgia. singers at the very front of the stage. That approach also sun and you’re feeling the warm heat and it’s coming down on them to unwind slowly, savoring each one and delivering Whether it’s actually true that people born in the mid ’80s and shapes the feel of the songs themselves. “It makes you you, and maybe you think to yourself, ‘Oh man, I feel so free them with something just north of regret.

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