PARQUET COURTS
When you’re sat in the beer garden of Dalston’s Shacklewell Arms on an exceptionally bleary Wednesday afternoon in March, Texas seems farther away than ever.
There’s a temptation upon meeting a band like Parquet Courts – purveyors of the kind of intense, rambling, two-chord-stuttering garage-rock that joins the dots between The Modern Lovers, The Yummy Fur and The Feelies – to read too heavily into their topography, to ascribe certain sounds to the group’s literal birthplace, Texas, and others to their relocated new home of New York. But our instinct to over-analyse is instantly quashed when Andrew Savage, guitarist and co-songwriter, asserts that, “that transition predated the band’s existence. A lot of people have been writing, like, ‘oh, this band moved from Texas to New York’, but that’s not the case.” Turns out that Savage, along with his brother Max, and friends Austin Brown and Sean Yeaton started the band post-relocation with neither place acting as a providential force.
The release of new album Light Up Gold sees the band carrying on where they left things with 2011’s gloriously scratchy, gloriously bleached American Specialties: a deftly lo-fi collection of distinctly American, packed-out- bar friendly stompers. The thing – aside from the hooks and the paradoxical loose-tautness of the playing – that draws the listener into Light up Gold are its lyrics. From the blank verse sloganeering of Master of my Craft (‘I got a gold medal, record time/gold medal, diamond mine/names in print, tongue, t-shirts and minds’) to the slacker stoner social commentary of Careers in Combat : ‘There are no more summer lifeguard jobs/ There are no more art museums to guard/The lab is out of white lab coats/Cause there are no more slides and microscopes/But there are still careers in combat, my son’). There’s a sense of lexical inventiveness that’s fitting for a band comprised of compulsive readers and obsessive writers. Sean does journalism, Austin’s written a play, Max is a creative writer, Andrew writes “so much that not all of it becomes lyrics; I guess one would call it poetry if anything”.
When asked about lyrical influences, Andrew and Austin – the band’s primary songwriters – are a little evasive. Andrew states that, “Lyrics, for me, are purely my own thoughts written in a notebook and then they become lyrics later. I write without purpose for the most part”. However, they’re a little more eager to discuss their current reading material (Andrew’s got a Don DeLillo collection on the go, Austin’s flipping between a Richard Hell autobiography and a recent issue of Playboy, and Sean’s juggling a book on the 13th Floor Elevators with the desire to re-read American minimalist Raymond Carver’s oeuvre).
When hearing Light Up Gold, the listener loses themselves in the rhythmic flurries of Austin and Andrew’s gnomic utterances, dreaming of landscapes dotted with “lost-era grain elevators/Feudal beginnings, amber wave looseness/Post-Nordic grinning tired and toothless”, chiming with the self-explanatory boredom that fuels Stoned and Starving (‘I was walking through Ridgewood, Queens/I was flipping through magazines/I was so stoned and starving/I was reading ingredients/Asking myself “should I eat this?”/I was so stoned and starving’). You’re in Parquet Courts country now – a place at once familiar and distant.
But it’s not all reading. During our time with the group, the conversation casually drifts towards tacos, the creation of, as Sean puts it, “the ultimate salty-sweet sandwich,” by combining Popchips and Oreos and stealing beer “Robin Hood style” from acts who get a better rider, as well as bands like Milk Music, PC Worship, Naomi Punk and Total Control.
Our meeting with the band takes place under the glare of a filming crew and the artificial lighting of a photographer and his assistant on an afternoon when London’s blanketed in the kind of post-rain puddle- grey which seemingly has no intention of going away. The visible tour-weariness on the group’s part seems justified under the circumstances. Having just returned from South by Southwest where, “One day we played three shows, the next day four shows,” it seemed right to ask them if the constant travel, the constant itinerary- checking and -keeping ever gets, well, a little boring? “I think it was the busiest schedule I’ve ever had, but I had the most fun”, Andrew assures us. “We ate a lot of great food. We’d all been traveling – we’d been in Mexico the week before – so we were used to the hustle and bustle of moving around and the logistics of everything.” And how does being in London compare to SXSW? “We’ve still got a shit-ton of stuff to do, it’s just in a different setting.”
It must be difficult, we say, to remember why you started a band in the first place, to forget about the pressures of making music in an age where everything is assessed instantly, a time when initial reactions count for nearly everything, when there’s a constant pressure to release something new? “Just personally speaking,” Andrew begins, “that’s a world I’m trying to get away from right now. I think that people are expected to react to things at the same speed as the digital world, and it’s just another extension of how we all want this instant gratification. I don’t think music should bow down to that kind of bad habit. Musicians are expected to oblige to it too much. I think all the forces should all revolve silently around the band so we can be somewhere where an artist can work and exist naturally and not have to worry about the anxieties of how fast something is going to be retweeted or reacted to. I try not to think about that auxiliary stuff and let it affect me too much, but it finds its way in. But”, he adds, “I don’t want to put out the impression that we’re puritan Luddites.”
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Light Up Gold is available now via What’s Your Rupture?/ Mom+Pop
Words: Josh Baines
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