Light Up Gold
Combining lean, spastic post-punk with the fractured charm of ‘90s indie-rock pinups Pavement, Parquet Courts’ debut is probably the only place you’ll ever hear anyone shout about Socrates in such close proximity to shouting about donuts. Opening with the whip-smart one-two punch of “Master of My Craft” and “Borrowed Time,” *Light Up Gold* reads like a poetry chapbook and sounds like an overheated garage, anchored by offhand beauty (“N Dakota”), jagged, surrealistic rants (“Donuts Only”), and the locomotive drone of “Stoned and Starving,” which turns a routine trip to the corner store into an odyssey of ancient-Grecian proportions.
Little was said about Parquet Courts' debut effort, American Specialties. Released exclusively on cassette tape, the quasi-album was an odd collection of 4 track recordings that left those who were paying attention wanting more. A year of woodshedding live sets passed before the Courts committed another song to tape. The band's first proper LP, Light Up Gold, is a dynamic and diverse foray into the back alleys of the American DIY underground. Bright guitars swirl serpentine over looping, groovy post-punk bass lines and drums that border on robotic precision. While the initial rawness of the band's early output remains, the songwriting has gracefully evolved. Primary wordsmiths A. Savage and Austin Brown combine for a dynamic lyrical experience, one part an erudite overflow of ideas, the other an exercise in laid-back observation. Lyrically dense, the poetry is in how it flows along with the melody, often times as locked-in as the rhythm section. “This record is for the over-socialized victims of the 1990's 'you can be anything you want', Nickelodeon-induced lethargy that ran away from home not out of any wide-eyed big city daydream, but just out of a subconscious return to America's scandalous origin," writes Savage in the album's scratched-out liner notes. Recorded over a few days in a ice-box practice space, Light Up Gold is equally indebted to Krautrock, The Fall, and a slew of contemporaries like Tyvek and Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Though made up of Texan transplants, Parquet Courts are a New York band. Throw out the countless shallow Brooklyn bands of the blasé 2000's: Light Up Gold is a conscious effort to draw from the rich culture of the city - the bands like Sonic Youth, Bob Dylan, and the Velvet Underground that are not from New York, but of it. A panoramic landscape of dilapidated corner-stores and crowded apartments is superimposed over bare-bones Americana, leaving little room for romance or sentiment. It's punk, it's American, it's New York... it's the color of something you were looking for. Austin Brown guitar A Savage guitar Max Savage drums Sean Yeaton bass
Parquet Courts are slackers in an almost classical sense, conjuring up just about every post-collegiate, pre-responsibility tendency you can think of. Their music ably mixes skittish post-punk and bedhead-riddled indie rock, a knot of Silkworm-inspired guitar tangles and insistent Wire tempos.
As riotous, guitar-led escapes from the drudgery of the day to day go, this is more than enough fun to convince you to go along for the ride.
This Brooklyn-based band of former Texans named after the floor on which the Boston Celtics play basketball released their debut album exclusively on...
Even though Parquet Courts call Texas home, NYC is their adopted residence and their searing mix of rock ‘n’ roll stomp and punk grit.
<p>New York band Parquet Courts' erudite garage-rock debut is both instantly addictive and enduringly rewarding, writes <strong>Tom Hughes</strong></p>