#742 Parquet Courts - Light up Gold

Crunchy 90's alt/underground revival is really in right now, but little of it manages to elevate or add anything new to the formula. Worse, many of its necromancers betray its legacy, infecting legitimate frustration and disillusionment with winking homage and halcyon nostalgia.

Parquet Courts tread the same ground with far better results, evoking Sonic Youth's dissonant peal, Minutemen's clean punk augularism, and Pavement's rusty jangle, but finding deep-tissue resonance beyond other imitators. Its not just the sound that's getting recreated, its the sentiment, its the dissolution, the deconstruction, the post-frustrated resignation, the entire early 20's, finished-college-now-what ennui, the curse of freedom, the terror of choice, the lack of animal survival drive and the scraping search for a substitute. This hit kids in the 90's, just smart enough, just far enough removed from christian panacea tradition to know there was something more, but not wise enough to find it, or to know that it wasn't going to be found.

That sentiment never went away, but it dropped out of music, 00's indie getting artier and prettier and largely drifting away from gritty scrabbling. Third wave stoner culture, in the guise of Wavves, Das Racist, No Age and countless others, provides the answer: I still have all those frustrations, and all those problems, but I'm embracing giving up. I'm accepting the loss of purpose, and allowing obliteration of self in the times when the search for self becomes too much.

These are the traditions married by Parquet Courts, whose noisy, drony rock rings on like Los Angeles haze, prodded on by Strokesy, New York post-punk backbeat, setting the stage for declarative, cavernous exaltations straight out of Guided by Voices*, The Fall, and yes, Pavement and Minutemen. The problems are insignificant and huge and rendering them as both is comforting and distressing, the unaddressed ever lurking in the corners. It's the 90's all over again, but done well, with the era's spirit soundly understood and represented, less a rehash than a legitimate update. Sure it basically only bangs together existing styles, but that's rock and roll, and I like it 4.5/5

* are you sure Caster of Worthless Spells isn't a lost Guided by Voices song? That sound, that song length, that song name, good god man, you owe Robert Pollard a coke.