Parquet Courts seem forever content with reverently blending late-’70s post-punk with mangy, Pavement-style melodicism. Though the New York City band’s latest, Sympathy for Life, has been hyped as their “dance” album, its flirtations with polyrhythms and dub-like synth effects barely puts it up to speed with Talking Heads’s 1980 album Remain in Light, much less the heavily electronic-based music of the present day.
If that makes Parquet Courts sound like Greta Van Fleet if they worshipped Wire instead of Led Zeppelin, that doesn’t account for the factors that make them one of the most crowd-pleasing bands in indie rock today: understated NYC cool and enveloping songwriting. Sympathy for Life lacks the emotional vulnerability of 2016’s Human Performance and, despite some entrancing synths, the zany eclecticism of 2018’s Wide Awake! But the charm of A. Savage and Andrew Brown’s lackadaisical voices and chummy melodies haven’t lost a bit of their allure.
On occasion, Parquet Courts ends up hewing too closely to their influences, as on “Marathon of Anger,” a bald-faced Kraftwerk facsimile that interpolates the melody from Talking Heads’s “Slippery People.” More often, though, they capture a vibe without copping someone else’s, like the strutting “Walking at a Downtown Pace,” with its clanging percussion and Sean Yeaton’s relentlessly grooving bassline. And though the track was recorded pre-pandemic, its references to “the smile on an unmasked friend” and “treasur[ing] the crowds that once made me act so annoyed” feel startlingly relevant.
As for the album’s electronic-influenced material, you may wonder if the 40-minute versions of “Marathon of Anger” and “Plant Life” that Parquet Courts teased might have captured the trippy hypnotism that the band appears to be aiming for better than the mercilessly trimmed-down edits that made the final cut. Still, a range of new instrumental textures enhance the songs more often than not, from the strange banjo-like synth tone that imbues “Zoom Out” and “Trullo” with a playful, stoner-y charm, to the unexpectedly heavy garage-rock guitars of “Black Widow Spider” and “Application/Apparatus.”
Ultimately, Parquet Courts prove that they’re still more than capable of writing songs that shine when rendered in the same no-frills style as those by their post-punk idols. The arrangements for the wistful “Just Shadows” and the bluesy “Pulcinella” are limited to just guitar, bass, drums, and vocals—and they’re just about perfect, amiably imparting a warm and familiar feeling that’s always been key to the band’s appeal. The latter track closes the album with yet another eerie allusion to “the mask com[ing] off,” but Sympathy for Life somehow makes it feel as though things are finally getting back to normal.
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