Constructed from a lot of improvised jam sessions, Parquet Courts‘ new album, Sympathy for Life, continues to embrace the band’s love of dance music and club rock.
Starting out with the groovy, bad-ass “Walking at a Downtown Pace,” the band makes you want to dress up, throw on some sunglasses at night, and strut your stuff on the way, at, and back from the club. The bass line is killer, the guitars a bit frantic, and the drums downright wicked. The song, like all the others on the record, was written before the pandemic, but now takes on an altered meaning post-pandemic. The lyrics are brutal truths: “I’m making plans for the day all of this is through…Food that I’ll taste and all the drinks that I’ll consume, return the smile on an unmasked friend…” / “Walk at a downtown pace and treasure the crowds that once made me act so annoyed.” / “Planning the future as if time is yours to choose.”
“Black Widow Spider” is a rocker about intense grief and trying to move beyond it. Believe me, I get it. “Marathon of Anger” brings in more synthesizers and electronic beats to create a dub-like banger about all of us getting back to the work of supporting each other after being separated for so long. “Just Shadows” is a tale of becoming addicted to routine, and how that gives you the false impression that you’re happy and everything is go well.
The beats on “Plant Life” would fit right in on a Talking Heads record. “Application Apparatus” is a song about the benefits and creepiness of GPS mapping – told with post-punk electro dance beats and guitar. “Homo Sapien” cranks the distortion for a song about how we’ve evolved from ancestors who beat stones into tools to people who crave “the sensual touch of glass, so smooth on the fingertips, the erotic quality of not feeling meaningless.” The title track seems to have been recorded with the ghost of Curtis Mayfield in the studio – it’s that groovy.
“Zoom Out” encourages us to look at the bigger picture (“When you zoom out, tomorrow is now. When you zoom out, together is now.”) – and to dance. “Trullo” is a weird, funky, skronky tale about cabin fever. The closer, “Pulcinella,” is a tale about being hesitant to embrace love again, especially after a long time away from it (“…the mind wanders home like a cat does when it knows it’s time to feed again.”). Again, I can relate.
The album is a clever mix of excellent lyrics, funky beats, and the promise of more epic things to come. Two of the tracks, “Marathon of Anger” and “Plant Life” were edited down from forty-minute jam sessions. I hope they kept recordings of them, because I’d love to hear those. How about releasing them to start afresh in 2022, PQ?
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Jacob at Pitch Perfect PR.]
