Music Review: Parquet Courts' 'Human Performance'

With their third full album “Human Performance,” New York garage rock outfit Parquet Courts has produced their most varied and interesting album to date.

In their first release since last year’s bizarre and borderline sadistic “Monastic Living” EP, “Human Performance” finds the band returning to its punk roots. Although it still wears influences from The Velvet Underground and The Ramones on its sleeve, the band has grown increasingly unafraid to shy away from increased instrumentation to more develop its own sound.

The opener “Dust” is literally about dust and is notable for Parquet Court songs because the lyrics are not one of the main focuses. As the lyrics urge the listener to "sweep," they become an afterthought to the gradual buildup of sound over a fuzzy and driving guitar riff that is eventually obscured by waves of distortion, distant piano chords and the sounds of New York (the band never lets you forget where it is from).

Most of the other songs are largely straightforward, however, with lyrical focuses on breakups and city living. There is, however, the occasional political song, like the driving “Two Dead Cops,” which seems to simultaneously remember two officers shot dead in New York and criticize the cops who say that to “Protect you / Is what they say/ But point and shoot / Is what they do.”

Other standout tracks include the titular “Human Performance,” which features beautiful rising keyboard lines while co-lead singer Andrew Savage channels Bob Weir in his conversational verses before the chorus expands into a cavern of reverb. The song eventually leads into a bridge of synth effects over surf-rock guitar, serving as yet another example of sonic experimentation that the band would have shuddered at on their first two LPs.

Such sonic experimentation also has the band using tropical drums lifted straight out of Marvin Gaye’s “Right On”—minus the ratchet—on “One Man No City,” where Savage describes disaffection with New York life. The album ends on an interestingly acoustic note, with the spare ballad “It’s Gonna Happen” featuring snare stutters and a simple strummed guitar over Eno-aping ambient synth work.

However, the punk is still there: low-key love song “Steady On My Mind” is built around a burbling electric guitar riff that echoes The Velvet Underground while co-frontman Austin Brown does his best Lou Reed impersonation and timpanis or bass drums crash in the distance. “Berlin Got Blurry” is composed of Savage’s Germanic tales of döner kebabs and getting drunk and churning surf guitar that wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack of “Pulp Fiction.”

“Paraphrased” and the incredibly named “Pathos Prairie” both could have worked on any of the band’s other albums, with powerful punk power chords and inscrutable lyrics that at once seem transcendent and nonsensical in their dry delivery. “I Was Just Here” sounds like Captain Beefheart in its start-and-stop guitar riffs and stomping drums as the band laments the closure of a local Chinese restaurant—another of the hazards of living in New York.