Parquet Courts are like that crush you had in high school – they’re smarter, cooler, funnier and more interesting than you and all you can really do is bow down to them and hope their cred will rub off on you. They’ve had a career that would make any discerning punk rock fan blush and go weak at the knees – from 2013’s Light Up Gold onwards, the group has released consistently excellent and challenging albums, reinventing their sound subtly each time. If someone asked me to design the band of my dreams, chances are they’d end up with something like Parquet Courts.
Now, fresh from last year’s Monastic Living EP, perhaps their most divisive release to date, the group returns with Human Performance. The group seems to be continuing the visual theme from their previous Rough Trade release – the melting man doing the dishes on the cover of Monastic Living is back again, apparently not having a very good time of it. If there was an award for album cover of the year, Parquet Courts would already have it locked.
The musical experimentation from the last EP has also resulted in a stylistic shift in terms of the sound – the opener “Dust” is a spiky slow builder that takes its time to kick into gear, which on the face of it presents a simple solution to the problem of “dust everywhere” – “sweep”. Who knows what it’s really about, but it’s the perfect left-field opener to the LP. This is followed by my current favourite from the album, the title track, a complex song about relationships and the “human performance” everyone gives in life. The music of this song is also typical of the approach of the band on this album – dramatic, complex, and diverse in its influences.
The band sounds freer than they ever have musically, even more than 2014’s Content Nausea. There is an incredibly wide musical palette on this record. There’s the usual Pavement influences but some tracks, particularly the centrepiece, “One Man, No City” and shorter songs like “I was Just Here,” are clearly informed by the brooding postpunk of groups like Wire. But that’s just the start; “Captuted By the Sun” and “Two Dead Cops” sound like what The Feelies would produce if they discovered a distortion pedal, while “Berlin Got Blurry” sounds like a deranged Western movie theme. There aren’t any tracks that explode like “Sunbathing Animal” here, but in its place is a sense of sonic experimentation and freedom that pays off more than it ever has.
The lyrics are also fantastic on Human Performance – the biggest drawback from last year’s Monastic Living was that aside from the opener, all the songs were wordless. The band has made up for that in spades, delivering words that are sometimes simple, sometimes obtuse, but always arresting. Every single song on the album has at least one amazing line, and the album will reward repeated listening – I’ve been listening to Human Performance non-stop for the past week and I’m still not quite sure what it all means. But I know I like it. The title of “Human Performance” basically sums up its lyrical theme: the album tackles how we communicate with eachother in the 21st century, and there is also a sense of isolation and estrangement, particularly in “Berlin Got Blurry” and “One Man, No City”.
Parquet Courts have delivered yet another fantastic album that offers a smorgasbord of weird – any fan of punk will find at least one song they love here. Even four albums in, the band still gives me that butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling of total infatuation. 2016 may have peaked early.
Review Score: 9.3 out of 10.
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