News Parquet Courts

: Parquet Courts
Based: Brooklyn
Listen: Bandcamp
Similar To: Harlem, CYMBALS

The first thing you notice about Brooklyn’s Parquet Courts is their cut and paste aesthetic. The sleeve of their new LP ‘Light Up Gold’ has a raw cutting room feel with scribbled amendments and hastily glued images scattered across it. It’s a look that immediately brings to mind the scrappy imagery of early punk. The aesthetic doesn’t end there. The scrappiness has bled through from ‘Light Up Gold’’s rough-hewn cover and seeped deep into the record itself.

You get the feeling Parquet Courts aren’t a band to drop an album and tour the set. And that’s why they’re so great. ‘Light Up Gold’ is an album of afterthoughts. Quick sketches of ideas that itch to be heard live. Like an image burnt onto the retina this is a faded approximation of something brilliant. ‘Light Up Gold’ isn’t the full stop on this collection of songs. It isn’t the cherry on the cake, it’s not even the icing. It’s the raw mix. Not everything’s quite so raw though. Their lyrics are sharp, erudite and effortlessly expressed. This is punk after a three-year liberal-arts course at Yale. Bands like Parquet Courts are becoming an increasingly rare breed and albums like ‘Light Up Gold’ even rarer. They’re worth embracing.

Stream ‘Master Of My Craft’: