2018 Album Retrospective #4: Parquet Courts - Wide Awake!
There's a reason that many people loudly and bitterly bemoan the rise of pop and hip-hop in the popular consciousness in place of rock music, and there is cause to sympathize with the all-too-common utterance 'rock is dead.' Fifty years after the reign of The Beatles, and half that since Kurt Cobain's tragic death, what is left of rock's spot in the modern zeitgeist is relegated to pop rock acts like Imagine Dragons who exist primarily to provide backing music for commercials.
Despite the absence of guitar shredding on the charts, the simple truth is that, for such a broad category as rock, talented artists will always exist if one looks hard enough. And to be fair, Parquet Courts borrow less from John Lennon and Nirvana and more from Elvis Costello and The Clash. But regardless of how much searching was done to unearth this gem, Wide Awake! is more than worth the time.
The New York City-based group has been churning out albums since 2011, yet nothing has ever come close to how inventive this album is. The lion's share of praise can be fairly given to producer Danger Mouse, who is most well known for much cleaner music than this. The band has brought their a-game to support his addition, however, with the drumming and bass playing in particular being noticeably improved.
To call this a rock record, while not incorrect, is far from the whole picture. Parquet Courts, more so than ever before, have created a healthy mix of indie rock, art punk, post-punk, and other subgenres that serve to demonstrate how unique their sound is. These are not just vague terms: they wear their influences clearly on their sleeve, and while the tracks here blend together in a delightfully coherent mix, it's easy to pick out where everything came from if you know what to look for.
The punk rock aspects of this record are strongest on cuts like Violence, whose production is dominated by the unsettling pairing of a bass line with erratic keyboard hits. Andrew Savage's vocals are much more unstable, practically divorced from the beat as he rants about how violence has become a part of every American's life. He refuses to mince words when describing the feeling of hearing the words 'suspected gunman' far too often in the news, but even in the unhinged raving there is room for eloquence: "Allow me to ponder the role I play/In this pornographic spectacle of black death".
Not that they intend to take all this lying down: right before this track, the opener Total Football sets an effective mission statement for the album. The title references a sports theory describing how any player on a football team can seamlessly rotate to any other outfield role; as a metaphor for calling all areas of society to work together, it is surprisingly apt. The chorus brings this comparison into sharp focus as a rallying cry: "Workers, authors/Poets, stoppers/Power resembled/If we are assembled". It's honestly refreshing to see punk finally return to its working-class roots.
This is the most defining feature of Wide Awake! when compared to other recent post-punk releases. Parquet Courts are less than happy with society, to be sure, but they channel that anger into art that is at once emotional, forward-thinking, and undeniably musical. The title track is a razor-sharp critique of how people co-opt the term 'woke' to flatter themselves, certainly, but it is also a relentlessly groovy song with creative percussion and guitar parts carried by a bass line so funky it threatens to steal the show from everything else going on.
When the grooves step back on the album's slower tracks, the lyrics are given room to breathe and demonstrate just how stellar they consistently are. Before the Water Gets Too High plods along leisurely, another solid bass performance and organ-like keyboard chords supporting poetic lyrics on the dangers of climate change: "In whose throat belongs the swan song/Of crisis, warming, denial, change?". Perhaps the most surprising moment here is the dissonant, personal Death Will Bring Change, sounding oddly positive as Savage croons about his sister's death in a car crash with painful lines like "The bottom of this well is rich with bitter water/It lays still, drowsy, dreaming, dying to get out".
Because of how tethered each piece of the album is to its whole (and also due to no shortage of talent), it's hard to pick out any weak moments in particular. The two shortest tracks, NYC Observation and Extinction, come back to back near the end of the record and are too short to make much of an impact, though their awkward presence near the climax is at least enjoyable for how brief it is. Even the more lyrically bland songs are far from uninteresting: Back to Earth comes to mind as a fumbled idea saved by atmospheric vocals and an eerie keyboard presence.
Those who lament the death of rock music must eventually come to terms with the fact that no genre can remain both popular and innovative forever; still, that does not mean the experimenting must stop. Every track on Wide Awake! could merit a full, in-depth discussion of the lyrics, the vocal style, the production and musicianship, and how it subtly pays tribute to its many influences. For all that they push post-punk and art punk forward, Parquet Courts also demonstrate just how good a genre can be even after its popularity has long since decayed. Rock music is dead; long live rock music!