Parquet Courts always seemed like a little more than some dudes thrashing it out in a rehearsal room. From their sound to the lyrics to their artwork to their worldview, there is far more to what they do than fulfilling the mechanics of production and consumption. The band is not their sole creative outlet – three of them have written for Michael Azerrad’s Talkhouse site – and there’s more than a hint of the bands profiled in Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life in the Parquet Courts approach, bands like The Minutemen and The Replacements.
Brown attributes the sharp, observational lyrics that populate their songs partially to plain old work ethic (“We all have a pretty good work regimen,” he says) and partially to the freedom of having multiple writers in the band, and multiple outlets for their collective written efforts – zines, screenplays, poems, etc.
Of course, one might miss all that if they were only listening to the semi-hinged, exhilarating sounds that Andrew Savage, Max Savage, Austin Brown and Sean Yeaton tend to make when they are put in a room together. That sound is wiry, energised and immediate, reminiscent of New York forebears such as The Modern Lovers and Richard Hell. Brown is flattered by such comparisons, but he resists the easy pull of the ‘New York band’ narrative.
“Well, we’re all transplants,” he says. “I’ve always had a fondness for the music that comes from New York, the stuff that we get compared to, and it’s always influenced me a great deal.” He rejects the idea that there is some essential ‘New York-ness’ to their sound, though. “We take a lot of influences from all over – bands from the UK, bands from Australia. I guess that because we live in New York, it’s easier for people to make that connection. I’m usually ok with who we’re compared to, though!”
And fair enough, too. Their music, though often site-specific, has something broader and more universal than many of the street poets that Lou Reed and the New York Dolls have birthed over the years. From the bastardised business jargon of Master Of My Craft to the catalogue of dead-end career paths in Careers In Combat, Parquet Courts have a rare ability to locate cultural fault-lines in an unnervingly casual, cheerful manner. When I put it to Brown that their breakthrough album Light Up Gold sounded like a document of the end of a cultural moment, a snapshot of the US in a time of recession and fundamental division, Brown offered a glass-half-full alternative view.
“I like to think of it as the beginning of something, I’d like us to be a signifier of change. I wouldn’t necessarily say that, but it would be nice.”
The band have always been determinedly accessible and unmediated, leaving their street address and phone number on their website, and mailing out mixtapes to anyone who expresses interest. Though their profile leapt up a few notches in 2013, Brown said that their newfound prominence has caused no crises, forced no compromises, and in fact, that life has largely sailed on as usual.
“People can still write to us about whatever. People say, ‘Come play at our house!’, and if we’re able to do that, we do. There’s this shitstorm of publicity that revolves around us in the echo chamber, but we still make friends at our shows – it’s not like we have a posse of security guards keeping people off our tour bus.”
In other words, the change is by very manageable degrees. “We’ve just gotten to the point where we’re able to tour with a lot more ease,” Brown explains, “but we’re still on the same plan that we had years ago: record, tour, and have a record to sell on tour.”
BY EDWARD SHARP-PAUL
