Parquet Courts look inward on the new Human Performance
According to Parquet Courts guitarist Andrew Savage, the band used to build its sound by focusing on a song’s lyrics until the music confirmed them. That sound, which first came to the public’s attention in 2012 with the Brooklyn combo’s superb second album, Light Up Gold, was anchored with punk-rock ri ffs and a torrent of words from Savage and fellow guitarist Austin Brown.
Partly on the strength of “Stoned And Starving,” one of Light Up’s standout tracks, and partly on the band’s occasional similarities to ’90s college-rock icons Pavement and Beck, Parquet Courts got tagged as a stoner or slacker band. But Savage and Brown were more interested in challenging a culture of disengagement, one of the main topics of 2014’s Content Nausea (released under the name Parkay Quartz due to the temporary absence of bass player Sam Yeaton and drummer Max Savage).
The band subverted expectations with the Monastic Living EP, which arrived at the end of 2015, and does so again with new album Human Performance, both of which came from the same set of four recording sessions, and represent the first Parquet Courts releases on the venerable Rough Trade label. They’re no longer a “words-first” band, for one. The EP, aside from one brief declaration of intent, is instrumental, a set of noisy, amorphous jams. The album is Parquet Courts at its most tuneful and song-oriented—it even contains, surprisingly enough, an ironyfree love song in “Steady On My Mind.” It marks a new phase for the band without being a disavowal of its past.
“Monastic Living is an insight into some of the sound experiments we were doing at the time,” says Brown. “It’s a cleansing of the palate a bit, both for us as songwriters and the palate of the listeners. It was kind of in the spirit of bands that we look up to, like Cabaret Voltaire, who were on Rough Trade, or the Dead C or Sonic Youth, who never felt beholden a strict sound or a way of making a record or what people might expect. It felt really good to get back to our roots of us discovering what we were as a band, just jamming in our studio.”
The EP is an alienating, difficult listen, and that’s the point, says Savage: “A lot of people who are interested in the band, from what I understand, are interested in the lyrics. And I don’t think that the only way to have a message is to say something. I wanted to say something without saying anything, you know? It’s a record that will appeal to only rabid Parquet Courts fans, maybe. In my mind, Light Up Gold through Content Nausea is really an era for the band, and Human Performance starts another. Monastic Living kind of exists between two times; I think American Specialties, our first record, is kind of like that: They both exist in their own place. So, it’s kind of like a cycle starting over.”
Human Performance, the band’s fifth e ffort, is a more personal record than any previous Parquet Courts album. Rather than looking outward to critique the culture, Savage and Brown examine internal feelings of displacement, alienation and domesticity. It’s an LP full of anxiety and existential questions. “It’s something a lot of our records deal with, but with this one it’s a lot more personal,” says Brown. “Rather than ask them about society, we’re asking them about ourselves.”
The album boasts a new range of textures: splashes of new-wave keyboards and surfguitar ri ffs; straightforward singing rather than rapid shouting. It has a greater clarity of detail than the lo-fi aesthetic of the early records, although it was still pretty much a DIY a ffair, with Brown doing most of the knob-twiddling himself.
Savage altered his writing process and wrote the music before the lyrics, which resulted in songs anchored in firmer melodies and that needed to be sung rather than declaimed. “When you start with words, they tend to get a more rhythmic delivery,” he says. “When you start with the music, you have the chords in your head, and as you’re making vocals, you have more of a melody. I just felt like singing is the way to express myself this time.”
“I think it’s really important for the band to stay in flux and not be pinned down to a certain kind of sound,” says Brown. “That was a big thing when we were making Human Performance. The last thing we wanted to do is make another ‘Parquet Courts’ record where people would hear it and say, ‘Yep, that sounds like another Parquet Courts record.’ That’s kind of my biggest nightmare. So many times you hear a band that you like, and the first record you hear is the one you fall in love with—that happened to us with Light Up Gold—and then after that it’s easy to get stuck in that. People hear the second record and they say, ‘OK, that’s more stu from a band that sounds like this.’ There’s a lot of songs that ended up on Human Performance that even when listening back, I wasn’t sure if I liked it or if it sounded like us, or if it was the right thing to do, or I couldn’t exactly tell where it fits in our canon. But by the end, those are the ones that became most important to me because I think those are the ones that will define the record as being di fferent and new.”
“I like that we have an experimental drone record that sits right next to a kind of poppy record,” says Savage. “Those kinds of contradictions appeal to me in art. I think Human Performance is a record that is at times very abrasive and at times very pretty. I like it when there’s a spectrum that someone can play with. I think that’s more interesting than taking a linear trajectory.”
—Steve Klinge
