‘Before the Water Gets Too High’
The Parquet Courts song is No. 13 in the top 25 songs that matter, according to a recent issue of the
New York Times magazine. What follows is writer and editor Larry Fitzmaurice’s writeup:
Music has mourned the death of our planet for decades. “How much more abuse from man can she stand?” Marvin Gaye asked in 1971 on “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” The college-rock astronaut Black Francis sang of holes in the sky and rising temperatures on the Pixies’ “Monkey Gone to Heaven” in 1989, grimly concluding that “Everything is gonna burn.” Four years later, the dance duo Orbital used warning klaxons on “Impact (The Earth Is Burning)” to conjure urgency about our impending global doom. Melissa Etheridge asked “Have I been careless?” on a song called “I Need to Wake Up,” from the soundtrack to “An Inconvenient Truth.” Others, perhaps, are resigned to watching the world burn: “I wanna see the animals die in the trees,” Anohni proclaimed in 2016 on her acerbic indictment “4 Degrees.”
If you’ve lost sleep over gigantic holes in Antarctic glaciers or the drastic decline of insect populations, the last several years have felt like the final third of Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” in which humanity awaits Earth’s catastrophic collision with another planet: watching our fate snap back like a boomerang, coming at us faster than ever with little in the way of prevention or defense. Until recently, there have been so many perceived wrongs to address on any given day that climate change has frequently found itself low on the list of to-do’s in our general consciousness; now, not even Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas – whose 2010 climate-change anthem, “Make a Wave,” claimed that “We hold the key that turns the tide” – can save us.
Which brings us to the Brooklyn indie rockers Parquet Courts: “Which hands get to turn the final page?” Andrew Savage dryly intones on “Before the Water Gets Too High,” a dread-drenched meditation that skips the ifs of climate change and heads straight to the whens. How do we prepare for devastation, and can we reckon with how useless our efforts to stop it have been?
Such questions have largely gone unasked in the indie sphere, especially as the genre signifier has transitioned over the last decade from ethos to marketing term. They’re new to the oeuvre of Parquet Courts as well; before the political party-punk of last year’s “Wide Awake!” the band spent more time musing about stoned bodega trips and the literal gathering of dust. But “Wide Awake!” found them addressing sociopolitical concerns including gentrification and groupthink, structural violence and the aftereffects of apathy, all with the freaked-out clarity of a wasted reveler realizing that the globe’s last keg is about to be kicked.