Light Up Gold – Parquet Courts
Almost everything about the concept of indie music was purposefully refined and redefined in the accelerated-evolution UK of the 1990s. Some of the results (trip-hop) ended up preserved in amber cul de sacs like back corner museum dioramas. And some of them (well, one: Britpop) exploded across the sky like a brand new population of mayflies. The fast and furious variety of that decade—some of it huge, some of it idiosyncratic—was enough to slow the rotation of pop music.
But something even better was happening in the US back then. And for the first time in a while, we behold an echo of that peculiarly American 1990s phenomenon. With the babbling, clanging debut album from Parquet Courts, American-style indie idiocy is back again.
It wasn’t, technically, the stuff of idiots back then. The angular and slovenly rock of Pavement/Guided By Voices/Archers of Loaf/Sebadoh/Superchunk was and has remained cloaked in a vestment of secret, intelligent grace. It has since been termed “Slacker Indie,” but that term, too, misses way too much of the point. For starters, Guided By Voices have put out somewhere around 37 albums, of which essentially all have very favorable song ratios of good:annoying, and Pavement industriously paced the entire decade with regularly spaced, fully nuanced albums. For seconders, almost all of the music of these bands zoomed and zagged everywhere with an excess of energy.
“Slacker” is actually a near-miss attempt at trying to describe a quality that these bands all shared, but which does not, alas, distill very well into a single word. The quintet of bands noted above were each clever, melodic, and messy, all at the same time. While the guitars were full of elbows, and the drumming full of knees, the ultimate effect recalled that of great skateboarders: who look like floppy-haired, bony messes draped in rags, but who possess the balance and athleticism of great athletes. To appear as though one isn’t trying very hard requires substantial skill, and greater effort.
And so the first introductory notes of debut album Light Up Gold arrive spaced one-by-one in dramatic fashion. (Four of them, when two would do. Just because.) Following them, an eruption of ramshackle pace, and a concise refrain summarizing the rewards of possessing effortless grace and skill:
Thread count: high
Commissions: high
Hourly rates: high
A minute of your time?
Forget about it.
The song is a brief exercise in sounding amateurish, rushed and off-the-cuff, and is winkingly titled, “Master of My Craft.” The narrator is pretty straightforward about not feeling beholden to the responsibility of his lofty gifts: he didn’t come “to dream,” or “to teach the world things,” or to “define paradigms.” Forget about it.
There is quite clearly more Smartass than Slacker going on here. But there is also enough energy to successfully power the mischief. Track 2 “Borrowed Time” brings forth more tempo and a nicer melody to complete a classic one-two leadoff punch, and all of a sudden we are having fun.
And then we are having more, because—preposterously—after the second track on this album mentioned nostalgia, the third nicks the intro to “Billy Jean.” And it is called, “Donuts Only.” And after a few bars of implied moonwalking, it launches a squall of feedback and a windpipe-spasm howl of lyrics competing for limited recording space with the guitar melody. Cue the outrageous non sequiturs. Nobody asked about Texas, but, “As for Texas: donuts only / you cannot find bagels here.” Despite the namecheck, the payoff doesn’t come in the form of “a chorus that inspires the score played in my myth-steeped years,” because the song is 81 seconds long and there is no chorus.
Things are happening fast now, and Parquet Courts are working quickly to unite energy and snark in a window-shattering explosion of hilarity. If the yelping singing voice and consequent near-indecipherability of the lyrics hasn’t ruined your day at this point, you have probably jacked the volume and surrendered to giggles and nostalgic euphoria.
Which is about where the band probably want you, because the statement pieces of Light Up Gold are right around the corner. It isn’t until track 4 that Parquet Courts relax into something resembling midtempo, aptly invoking chemical assistance with same in “Yr No Stoner.” Interestingly, the slowed pace doesn’t allow for much more total time (1 minute, 50 seconds,) nor again does it allow for choruses. But “Yr No Stoner” gives us two pretty glorious verse-opening slice-of-warped-life lines, “Storm-chasing hippies at a discount mall,” and “There’s billionaire buses on my unlit street.” After a few rounds of invigorating mania earlier in the album, this kind of thing feels closer to the band’s wheelhouse, or maybe closer to the listener’s, and better for it.
Said elaboration upon time and setting reaches full flower on tracks 9 and 10, “N. Dakota” and “Stoned and Starving.” The former is a really quite remarkable ode to the Peace Garden State, whose entire lyric could be justifiably quoted to show off its quality. But to hem the sprawl, this highlight only:
Cigarette advertisement country,
Wild and perfect, but lacking something,
In Manitoba, they call it boring,
At night we hum, to Canada’s snoring.
“Stoned and Starving” clocks in at a robust five minutes-plus, doing so around a winning guitar melody and some deft soloing. Such groove-mongering is a wild departure from the album norm, and luckily the song is up to the task of standing out. Good stuff.
Taken as a pair, these two tracks seem to push Parquet Courts up into the strata of Lofty Follow Up Album Expectations. They are naturally well-executed (dare we say, slackerish) and a departure from the album’s early tendency to try to do and say everything before taking a second breath. (There is a third exemplar later in Light Up Gold called “Tears O Plenty.” Which for a pull of the lever on a debut album comes eye-openingly close to three 7’s.)
There is, unsurprisingly, a lot of crap intermixed. Listeners will find even some of the best songs to be nigh-unlistenable for the first four of five exposures, and some of the others are never going to sound good to those who are not underwater or unconscious. But that type of 1990s US indie reality has framed the miracle of the digital music revolution, which has eliminated indulgence from the menu, and headaches from the aftermath. 37 hypothetical Guided By Voices albums would get you at least 20 solid CDs worth of bliss.
The chief failings of Parquet Courts’ debut are the band’s dovetailing tendencies to mistake acting (or singing) stupid with actually being good, and their lack of the skill sets necessary to capture the same effortless excellence as their forebears. (Some of these lyrics are genius. Perhaps they could have been sung rather than hyper-warbled.) But it is still early, and maybe they will get better. Which is to say, maybe they will try a bit harder: slackerdom being the domain of the gifted and the driven.
Keepers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15
August 2013
