New York’s Parquet Courts hit Loppen on Friday following a summer tour that has seen them sending European audiences bonkers with their brand of supercharged stoner punk. Well-received festival performances over the summer have led to them being able to sell out smaller venues, and the Loppen gig is part of an extensive European tour that is growing their fanbase and building on the critical acclaim of their debut album, Light Up Gold.
Although now based in Brooklyn, three of the four-piece hail from Texas. The songwriting guitarists, who share vocal duties, Andrew Savage and Austin Brown met at Denton University in the Lone Star State and hooked up again in New York, where they recruited bearded Bostonian bassist Sean Yeaton and Savage’s drummer brother Max. Despite their Southern roots, Parquet Courts sound like quintessential New Yorkers, combining the lyricism of Jonathan Richman and the energy of the Ramones: a cross between the bands Television and Pavement.
Savage and Brown cite writers like Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace as influences and the lyrics, when you can actually make them out through the cacophonous din, are certainly original and well thought out. I don’t think I have ever heard the Bismarck Tractor Association cited in a rock song before, as it is in ‘N Dakota’ on debut album Light Up Gold, and the subjects covered range from an industrial-military complex (‘Careers in Combat’) and corporate capitalism (‘Master Of My Craft’), to the paucity of bagels in Texas and lunch options in Queens (‘Stoned And Starving’).
Light Up Gold was recorded ‘as live’ over four days in New York last year and it captures the urgency of the band’s live shows. Seven of the 15 songs clock in at less than two minutes, recalling the brevity of punk bands like the Damned, Wire and the Ramones. Even the epic ‘Stoned and Starving’, with its extended feedback-drenched guitar wig out, is only just over five minutes long. The songs are just vehicles for the lyrics, with no extraneous musicianship, and those lyrics are often just a couple of verses.
Parquet Courts’ sound features lots of distorted guitars and feedback, and there are times when the songs sound as if they are about to shambolically disintegrate, but the fact that all five members stop playing at the same time shows that they do actually know what they are doing. The bass and drums of Yeaton and Max Savage are incredibly tight and pacey and liberate the guitars of Brown and Andrew Savage from rhythmic duties, allowing them to bounce riffs off each other and go off on distorted tangents.
Musically, Parquet Courts are not doing anything that radical, nor are they significantly shifting the post-punk paradigm, but they are very good at what they do. Despite their lyricism and literary influences, they don’t take themselves too seriously. Indeed, they warn of the dangers of overthinking, pointing out in the last line of ‘Master Of My Craft’: “Ya know, Socrates died in the fucking gutter.” See them while you can still do so at a relatively intimate venue.
Parquet Courts
Loppen, Christiania;
Friday 21:00;
Tickets 120kr,
www.billetlugen.dk
