Parquet Courts have racked up a lot of critical acclaim since forming in 2010. Their albums—like 2014’s Sunbathing Animal and 2012’s Light Up Gold—received glowing reviews and Sunbathing Animal even sold well, peaking at Number 55 on the Billboard 200. They toured the world, played many of the major festivals, and performed on a number of big talk shows. Now they are back with their latest, Human Performance, and the insular indie world is breathless with anticipation.
And—I’ll be honest—I don’t get it.
In a way, Parquet Courts represent everything wrong with indie rock. They have attitude. They have swagger. They write clever lyrics. But attitude, swagger, and clever lyrics don’t compensate for lousy musicianship, inferior vocal performances, and shoddy songwriting. Music—like all art—requires skills. At some point, you have to hunker down and master your craft, something Parquet Courts seem unwilling to do.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you need to be a virtuoso. The music world is filled with incredible, unschooled, self-taught non-virtuosos. But Parquet Courts are not in that league. Too often on Human Performance, they try to obfuscate their limitations with cool—but cool doesn’t make for great music.
For example, on “Dust,” the album’s opener, and for about a third of the album’s material, they sit on a one chord vamp and mouth intelligent poetry in an emotionless monotone. Sticking to a monotone does mask their inability to sing, but the effect gets old fast. They try interesting tricks, like on “Dust” and “I Was Just Here” the monotone is doubled with a second voice an octave lower. It sounds great, but only goes so far—cool effects aren’t a substitute for mediocrity.
Andrew Savage and Austin Brown split the vocal duties on Human Performance and Brown is the weaker of the two. Savage can at least get worked up and sound like a real punk rocker when the song’s energy is intense enough. He sounds good on the 60’s-ish title track, on the song “Outside,” and pulls off a solid performance on “Berlin Got Blurry” as well. But Brown—at least I think it’s Brown—on songs like “Keep It Even” and “It’s Gonna Happen,” is downright painful. His voice is weak, uncommitted, and out of tune—and it’s that way because he doesn’t know how to sing.
The guitar playing isn’t much better. To be fair, there are moments of brilliance: the dual interlocking parts on “I Was Just Here” imitate the off-kilter genius of Captain Beefheart and sound fantastic. The Spaghetti Western lead on “Berlin Got Blurry” is effective and catchy. But those flashes of what-could-be are mostly obscured by an embarrassing lack of skill, the most glaring example being the Indian-inflected extended jam that ends “One Man, No City.” It’s difficult to listen to—it’s that horrible—and at best sounds like an excited 15-year-old first discovering his instrument (I’m being charitable). The rinky-dink noodling on “Berlin Got Blurry” isn’t much better, which is unfortunate because it’s an otherwise solid song.
Look. I understand. The DIY punk aesthetic is a rejection of bombastic, self-indulgent wank. It eschews formal study, which inhibits creativity and self-expression. That’s the theory. I disagree, but I understand why some refuse to nosedive down the rabbit hole of music nerditude. But there is a huge difference between nerding out on obscure modes and complex chord substitutions versus acquiring the basic dexterity necessary to play your instrument. Parquet Courts need to focus on basics: things like holding a guitar pick, singing in tune, fingering single notes, and vibrato. Those aren’t difficult skills, but they take practice and discipline.
And for my money, that is the tragedy of Human Performance. It isn’t a terrible album. It has some good songs on it. Parquet Courts have their hearts in the right place and an intuitive sense of what should be great music.
But Parquet Courts are severely limited, they get stuck too easily and I doubt they are able to execute the music they hear in their heads. And that’s because they can’t really sing or play their instruments. The album sounds good—they hired pros to do the engineering, mixing, and mastering. The layout and artwork looks good—that wasn’t left to a beginner either. But the music—what the album is supposed to be about—never fulfills its potential and at points is unlistenable. In my opinion, that’s because the musicians never made the effort to do just that—become musicians.