Parquet Courts
★★★★ Sympathy For Life ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP
Punk-evoking quartet deliver slimmed-down Sandinista!
THESE TEXAS-BROOKLYN firebrands were fixing to save US alt-rock, before tension between co-frontmen Andrew Savage and Austin Brown, then global events, prevented them from clinching the deal. On 2018’s Wide Awake!, the chalk-and-cheese duality served up a creatively crackling split between politico-punk/ new wave (Savage) and dubby otherness (Brown). Here, there’s movement every which way, like The Clash in 1980, yet across just 10 tracks, as Brown modernises via Korgs and e-drums, and Savage, who wrote nocturnally in
Italy after days spent ‘trippy lifting’ (pumping iron on LSD), chases “Can, Canned Heat & This Heat”. Certainly, the anti-capitalist Plant
Life and Black Lives Matter meditation Marathon Of Anger feel convincingly Krautrocking, and broadly groove supplants anthemics, but in amongst the jumble of influences, trad indie-guitar
Parquet remains: in, say, the early Go-Betweens-y Just Shadows, and the galvanising lyrics of collective consciousness – written pre-pandemic, but wonderfully inspiring for late 2021.