Review: Parquet Courts – Wide Awake

parquet courts wide awake cover

A little less rough around the edges, Wide Awake! shows that it wasn’t rawness that gave Parquet Courts their appeal, but rather genuinely compelling songwriting and inventive approaches to punk attitudes.

 

Before Parquet Courts formally announced their sixth album Wide Awake!, the band revealed that they had been working with the famous producer Danger Mouse in the studio. Details about producers are usually the type of technical intricacies that only concern diehard listeners, but the contrast between Danger Mouse and Parquet Courts was enough to raise even casual listeners’ eyebrows. For starters, Danger Mouse’s recent production credits include albums by U2, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, and A$AP Rocky. For the more indie-attuned, if you’ve noticed a difference between newer and older Black Keys releases, that’s when Danger Mouse got involved.

Parquet Courts, on the other hand, are a lo-fi rock band who have prided themselves on a DIY ethos and previously utilized minimal post-production. This style caused the term “slacker rock” to follow the band around for years, much to their chagrin. So, could joining forces with a pop producer be their way of playing against type? Did they want to totally put the comparisons to Pavement, a band they never really loved that much, to rest? More to the point, would Danger Mouse do to Parquet Courts what he did to the Black Keys and deliver them commercial success at the expense of the stripped-down aesthetic that had come to definite their initial releases?

Rest assured, Wide Awake! will not be played in stadiums anytime soon, and it’s still very much a product of the same Parquet Courts we’ve come to know and love. A little less rough around the edges, it’s a tighter and more cohesive effort than anything they’ve done before, but a logical enough next step from 2016’s Human Performance as to not shock listeners. Above all, Wide Awake! shows that it wasn’t rawness that gave Parquet Courts their appeal, but rather genuinely compelling songwriting and inventive approaches to punk attitudes.

With influences from reggae to funk to hardcore punk, most of Wide Awake! is distinctive without completely upending the band’s foundation. Mid-tempo rock songs form the core of the album, much like Human Performance, and its longest tracks barely exceed four minutes. Yet Wide Awake! is still an album of superlatives for Parquet Courts. Opener “Total Football” is the most intense the band has ever sounded, without relying on the thrash of Sunbathing: singer/guitarist Andrew Savage escalates his vocals into a series of punctuating shouts until he sounds as if he’s about to lose his voice, and stick around for some really impressive lead guitar shredding. The album’s first single “Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience” is the first time the band have put two songs on the same track, and the segue from one to the next is the band’s best transition since “Master of My Craft” to “Borrowed Time” on Light Up Gold. “Mardi Gras Beads” tones things down, and is the most 60s the band have sounded, with psychedelic guitars that echo the Zombies or the Byrds.

 

Most of the aforementioned influences behind Wide Awake! present themselves discreetly, and you might not give them second thought unless you were specifically looking for them. For instance, on “Violence,” an artificially deep voice akin to Darth Vader arrives, in a nod to George Clinton’s Funkadelic. The trudging “Before the Water Gets Too High” takes cues from dub music, and is driven by bassist Sean Yeaton laying down its melody. On that note, Yeaton really excels on Wide Awake!, with multiple tracks giving the bass and guitar equal footing. One of the album’s highlights comes halfway through “Normalization,” when a bass solo gives way to a short breakbeat interlude that really puts him center stage. More so than previous Parquet Courts releases, Wide Awake! seriously rewards attention to detail.

Despite a general consistency grounding the album, Parquet Courts do occasionally get overeager to show you new tricks on Wide Awake! First and foremost among these is the album’s title track, a funky song with Latin-style drumming and a guitar part that sounds like mid-career of Montreal. For all its character, with all four band members singing in unison and street noise sound effects in the background, it sticks out as the most “radio-friendly” single on the album, and is the band’s most blatant foray into pop yet. The release of this track as a single prior to the album caused some concern regarding what else Danger Mouse potentially had in store, but thankfully it’s a one off on Wide Awake!  “Tenderness” revolves around a honky tonk piano melody, and would be much more jarring were it not the album’s closer. Lastly, “Death Will Bring Change” brings in a children’s choir to sing its titular chorus, oddly similar to the Decemberists “We All Die Young” from a couple months ago. Regardless, the Indiecator takes a firm stance against children on songs.

Parquet Courts have long walked the line between indie rock and punk a la Titus Andronicus, but this was rooted more in general anti-commercialism with only the occasional explicitly political lyric. However, as certain disquieting events have transpired since Human Performance’s early 2016 release, Wide Awake! is a decidedly political album. “Total Football” serves as a call to arms for “rebels, teachers, strikers, sweepers” and whoever else will join in collective action. It’s hard to imagine anyone but Savage making cumbersome lines like “swapping parts and roles is not acting but rather emancipation from expectation” work, and the closing “fuck Tom Brady!” will unite most outside New England.

That said, you might have guessed that a band who found early success with a track called “Stoned & Starving” aren’t exactly masters of subtlety. Given the album’s political edge, you can essentially tell what the messages behind tracks “Before the Water Gets Too High” and “Normalization” will be from their titles. Likewise, Savage’s slam poetry delivery on the verses of “Violence” does indeed discuss violence in many forms and its pervasiveness in American life, but risks being weighed down by its own verbosity by the time he asks “what is an up-and-coming neighborhood and where is it coming from?” Least subtle of all, if you were wondering if Wide Awake! had any connection to the band being “woke,” you’re unfortunately correct, as the title track includes the line “mind so woke cause my brain never pushed the brakes.”

This bluntness may disappoint those who remember Savage once wrote a song that alluded to Soviet composers (“Ducking & Dodging”), but he certainly hasn’t lost his knack for observational storytelling. On “NYC Observation,” he tells of having to witness poverty and strung-out drug addicts every day in his neighborhood, contemplating “how to glide past people on the sidewalk” and “trying not to look, you’re not the person to solve them.” Simple lines like these paint a very vivid picture, all in an under a minute and a half-long track, and his dexterity with lyrics like these recalls Content Nausea’s standout “The Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth.”

If Savage is the band’s fiery activist on Wide Awake!, then co-singer/guitarist Austin Brown serves as its introspective mystic. Taking the lead on fewer tracks than on Human Performance, he emerges when the tempo slows down and the mood mellows out. On the spacey “Back to Earth,” Brown sings of how we should “get love where you find it, it’s the only fist we have left to fight with” as if he’s just come upon a grand revelation from the afterlife. Similarly, “Death Will Bring Change” finds Brown coming to terms with the death of his sister at a young age. Even love receives a scrutinizing examination on “Mardi Gras Beads,” with lines like “I’m living like a vagabond that just can’t decide when to leave.” It’s an intriguing new side to Brown, and his presence definitely complements Savage on Wide Awake!.

Perhaps one of the greatest assets of Wide Awake! is that it defies simple categorization. It’s a political album, but one that still carries enough humor to include the lyric “wanted to be needed so I fed my cat” (from “Extinction”) and to name a song “Freebird II.” It’s punk rock, but it brings in as many disparate styles as the Clash, and sounds distinctly modern. It’s the most heavily-produced Parquet Courts release, enough to add crowd sound effects, but it’s hard to imagine live performances sounding dramatically different than the studio versions. Wide Awake! is not only the latest in a line of relatively impeccable Parquet Courts releases, but also solidifies them as one of the most compelling rock bands out there now.

Rating: 8/10

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