Portland – Last March Parquet Courts cheekily posted a list on their blog that catalogued the myriad references to them as “slackers” in the press. Fifty-two entries in all, the quotes range from endearing (“the sort of bed-headed slackers you’d meet at a 90’s college party”) to paradoxical (“Brown and Savage might be slackers by trade”) and give a good idea of the narrative that surrounded the band when their sophomore album, Light Up Gold, topped several best-of lists in 2013.
In the media’s defense, Light Up Gold’s ramshackle punk riffing and occasional forays into stoned philosophy did bring to mind a certain Linklater film from the nineties. But behind the album’s beat-punk veneer there was an industrious wit and a meticulous approach to lyrics. The opening track, “Master Of My Craft,” is a three minute romp that skewered the self-important narcissism of a busy professional with the precision and perfect wording of a well-crafted short story.
After releasing a five song EP in the interim, the New York-via-Texas quartet have shown up for work again with a third full length, Sunbathing Animals, out June 3 on What’s Your Rupture?/Mom + Pop. The first single from the album, title track “Sunbathing Animals,” gives the impression that we are in a for another high-beats-per-minute gallop (the sheet music for the track, which the band released ahead of the song itself, has an awful lot of black ink on it). And there are frenetic moments on this album to be sure, but the full-steam-ahead strumming has been tempered by a collection of fun, sloppy grooves like the one that drives the opening track, “Bodies Made Of.”
You could accuse the band of getting old, but they’ve already beaten you to the punch: the slower tempos showcase a dense bundle of lyrics often concerned with the problems of aging. Lyricist Adam Savage, now in his late twenties, asks the inevitable questions that come when you’re not old, but not young either. At times he seems alienated from his own body, as in the excellent third track, “What Color Is Blood.” Other times he wonders about his art, as in the handclapping “Black and White” when he queries, “How does writing letters from the lonely margins feel when there is no hair on my head?” All throughout, the songs are populated with idiosyncratic people who—beastlike—snarl, shed, scratch at doors, awake in nests, and search for happiness while feeling the blues from their heads to their tails.
The highlight of Sunbathing Animals is the slowest jam of them all, “Instant Disassembly”- a boozed out seven minute reverie built around tambourine and a beautiful, woozy guitar. Descending into an indeterminate darkness, Savage begs for both rejection and rescue from a companion who lays him bare. He’s ecstatic, he’s doomed, and, when the refrain hits, the song feels like the best ode to post-party ennui since Johnny Cash gave us “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”
By this point in their career it’s apparent that Parquet Courts aren’t going to reinvent the wheel; Lou Reed, Stephen Malkmus—the influences are all there for the naming. But when the wheel is this good it doesn’t need to be reinvented. Sunbathing Animals is the real deal; a lyrically rich album worth returning to as often as some of the greats.
Photo By Ben Rayner
