A band that's frustrated nearly as much as they've pleased me, Parquet Courts are this week dropping their most accessible and -- wait for it -- pleasing record yet! I say "pleasing" and not "pleasant" because Sympathy for Life is rough as hell. That said, the Rough Trade Records release is consistently energetic in a way that this band's rarely been.
Willfully obtuse, Parquet Courts have spent years aping The Fall and James Chance, among others, while delivering albums that rarely caught the kind of fire that justified the fervor within the grooves. They were busy records, but not entirely successful ones. Sympathy for Life serves up grooves and riffs, and a deftness that sort of surprised me. Opener "Walking at a Downtown Pace" is one of the best things this group's ever committed to tape, as far as I'm concerned, and "Black Widow Spider" is nearly as good. Parquet Courts succeed when their attack is this peppy and sharp, not when it's amorphous and detached.
Singer A. Savage shuttles nearly out of Mark E. Smith-mode and into Malkmus-mode on "Just Shadows", a lopsided charmer here. This all feels like a Parquet Courts record but track after track reveals a new focus. It may indeed have taken the group this long to find their groove, or they've simply decided they'd rather be Pavement circa 1997 than Pavement circa 1989. That might be an unfair thing to write, given the electro-clash rush of "Application Apparatus" in the middle of the album, or the Talking Heads-aping "Zoom Out" a bit after that. Parquet Courts are, as usual, starting with a certain Fall-inspired template and then layering other influences on top of that. In the past, that sometimes didn't work, but at least Sympathy for Life is a consistently enjoyable record, and one which reveals this group's strengths and few of their weaknesses.
Sympathy for Life is out on Friday via Rough Trade.
More details on Parquet Courts via the official website.
[Photo: Pooneh Ghana]