There's a good call for Brooklyn garage-punks Parquet Courts being the surprise package of 2013. Their debut album proper (following a self-released cassette) arrived in the States last year, and word-of-mouth quickly spread - the band have no social media sites, if you find Facebook or Twitter accounts they're not official - and upon its release in the UK early this year, 'Light Up Gold' received rave reviews, and these have only intensified as more people have heard the record and time has allowed it to become absorbed into people's consciousness better. Those end of year lists will be with us any day now, just wait and see how many high placings it gets. So it was little surprise that this month's brand new EP 'Tally All The Things That You Broke' was on the receiving end of much of the same. Is the hype justified or will they simply be considered another good band in a year or two from now?
As a lover of garage-punk, my personal view is that these four guys do have something a little extra; you could even throw in comparisons to Pixies as well as the usual 1977 punk bands. They're well above average, but perhaps not the saviours of the Universe as some would have you believe. Single 'You've Got Me Wondering Now' does everything right and is a thrill; the feedback-riddled, spiky-riffed 'Descend (The Way)' is even better. Songs such as 'The More It Works' dip deeper into the sharp post-punk of Gang Of Four: their references are a music journalist's dream. You get a similar feeling of revolutionary sounds being brushed up and presented to a new generation as happened with the first Strokes album, only Parquet Courts don't have the pop songs to make that kind of sales impact, and that's not a bad thing. The final two tracks are a contrast. 'Fall On Yr Face' falls short of a minute-and-a-half and is stylistically different too, perhaps not quite fitting with the rest, not that Parquet Courts are really about "fitting" with anything; and the equally diverse 'He's Seeing paths' is over seven minutes of Beck-like experimental rock with a nod to hip-hop and something of The Beta Band about it. The praise is justified for now, and Parquet Courts seem open to diversification too, so if they can nail that aspect then they'll be here to stay.
Parquet Courts' website
Stream the EP in full
Catch them live:
Oct 30 – Brudenell, Leeds, UK
Oct 31 – Mono, Glasgow, UK
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