arquet Courts recorded 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 Most Freedom is Deceiving would eventually call 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, 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 , 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 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. “Time waits over raised in the ’90s are lacking in the proper imagination really isn’t write the melody around the words,” Savage says, “which right now.’ But what’s really happening is you’re captive to behind your shoulder/In the onset of your wandering years/ the point anymore. What matters, at least as far as Parquet Courts is interesting. It’s the way opera is written, because most the sun.” Those two realities tug at the song from either end, Until you’re not the same old fool you once took yourself for,” are concerned, is that the popular reaction to musicians who interact opera librettos are based on poems or some epic story that’s giving it its tension. “[The] duality of captivity and confinement he sings. “Let me slip into my insomniac shoes/And step out with history in any capacity is to assume that they’re doing so as a already written.” versus true freedom is kinda addressed where the music is very the door into the garden of my unpaid dues.” It’s hard not to kind of tribute. We’ve lost the ability to see any band as participants Savage’s verses frequently extend beyond their logical regimented. It’s one single, repeating note, and that represents hear it as a pining for times past, for a return to a recognizable in a tradition. “I think we are kinda tethered to things,” Savage says. bounds, forcing him to fold syllables over into the next bar, the confinement side of the duality, whereas the guitar parts space where the work is more easily defined: Tend this field. “As much as I want to do something new with rock music, ultimately say, or to insert strange, clipped spaces in the middle of a are supposed to represent the freedom. But ultimately I think The fight to do that very thing—to remain faithful to what I am tethered to the tradition of rock music. That becomes the line in order to accommodate the flow.Sunbathing Animal's the confinement wins out, because the guitars, as wild and they’ve inherited despite the confusion and contingencies of challenge of being in a rock band and [working] in a medium that’s title track and lead single, a four-minute-mile of a punk unhinged as they seem to be, still exist within the boundaries of the world that work has introduced them to—is what powers so self-referential. When you try to distance yourself too far from song, runs by so quickly that he almost seems to get lost in the rhythm of the song.” Sunbathing Animal. “I never really think about things in terms tradition, it ends up sounding foreign and lost.” his own lines, tripping over himself to get everything out The idea comes up later in “Duckin’ and Dodgin’,” which of, ‘How can I sustain this career?’” Brown says. “I think the Parquet Courts can only properly be understood as workers at before the song runs its course. The whole thing barrels by shuffles along on a similar one-note groove, though now it’s important questions are, ‘What’s the right thing to do?’ and the inexorable front edge of what Savage calls “a path in rock and roll” on a single note, played over and over again so quickly and been tweaked to allow a little bop. Savage is wandering again, ‘What’s the right next step, what feels right?’ Not for the sake that starts with The Velvet Underground and winds its way through with such ferocity that it begins to melt into one industrial this time through “the motherland” with its “steps and gables, of anything besides looking at every move we make as a part Television and, yes, Pavement and on to The Strokes. To assume heave. Savage and Brown trade anxious solos between steeples, stairways” that emanate from “the lineage of influence” of our art or the bigger picture or a small step to a greater goal. that what they’re doing is in some way a revival of the gold soundz the paragraph-long verses. “‘Sunbathing Animal’ really to remind him of one thing: “I cannot be freed.” If anything, the It’s not our mission to prove anything.” He reconsiders for a of 25 years ago is to assume that Parquet Courts are self-consciously punishes you with the lyrics, and you’re kinda forced to song is even more deceptive than “Sunbathing Animal,” which moment, then continues. “In a way it is, but it’s a bummer to looking over their shoulder as they play. But they’re smarter than pay attention,” Brown says. “It can be a little aggressive at at least has the decency to broadcast its frustration through be misunderstood.” F that. Influence may be the kind of bug that can never be cured, but first, but when you listen to it, the less you really care for wall-to-wall guitar action. “Duckin’ and Dodgin’” doesn’t move that doesn’t mean the sick are suffering. Parquet Courts are just the chord change. You’re waiting for that line in the middle so much as it scoots, with Yeaton laying a little boogie and giving aware of their own infection and the limitations it places on them. of it, that thing that you hear, that lyric that you really like Savage enough of a turnaround to shout out a chorus that may And there’s freedom in that, in knowing who you are and how you’ve a minute and a half in. It doesn’t matter what part it is, it well have been ripped from some old unattributed blues song. been shaped. How does the old saying go? You can never quarantine doesn’t have to be the hook. There’s no real chorus to that the past. So why pretend to? song. No repeating thing. It’s just a stream of lyrics.”

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