News / / 12.06.14

Parquet Courts

Sunbathing Animal (What’s Your Rupture?)
16/20

Coming on like The Fall if Mark E Smith and his rotating band of eccentric scruffs had been soused in Pabst Blue Ribbon rather than Tenants Super and swapped the grim environs of outer Manchester for the parched-porches of Texas, Parquet Courts seem set to be one of those bands happy to release the same record over and over; a manifestation of the innate joys to be found in repetition. If you fell for the hyper-literate cow-punk of 2012’s Light Up Gold or last year’s scratchier, bolshier, slightly weirder Tally All The Things That You Broke EP, then you’re likely to find a huge amount to enjoy in Sunbathing Animal.

As time marches ever onward and we run the risk of being sucked into the vortex mistakenly labelled progress, there’s something refreshing about a band happy to become masters of their craft – in this case marrying Modern Lovers style Velvet Underground chugging riffola with a dose of The Feelies’ nervous energy and then stuffing that combo with a garbled lexicon of engaging non-sequitur and multisyllabic intonation – with- out a self-conscious desire to be seen reinventing the wheel through self-conscious genre-hopping. Sunbathing Animal tears along all spindly and sunburned, 46 minutes of leanly-ripped lead guitar lines splattering like Jackson Pollock with the shakes, a solid hit of wiry joy. That its only the slower outliers – Instant Disassembly, Up All Night – that linger in the memory is no bad thing; Sunbathing Animal works precisely because it’s a blur. Don’t change boys, don’t change.

– – – – – – – – – –

parquetcourts.wordpress.com

Words: Josh Baines

CONNECT TO CRACK