With each release, Brooklyn’s Parquet Courts open up their style more and more, on 2018’s critically acclaimed Wide Awake! the band worked Danger Mouse and added a few funky flourishes to their angular rock. For their follow-up, Sympathy For Life, Parquet Courts have made their largest stylistic leap yet with a “dance” album and doing a damn good job of it.
Synths, beats, and rhythms are at the forefront as the band has poured out a moveable bunch of tunes. The opener “Walking At A Downtown Pace” uses heavy drums, a great bassline, and a funky strutting style reminiscent of Madchester early 90’s outfits and Primal Scream. The track is a banging, confident announcement that things are going to be different and very successful this go around.
The band (Andrew Savage – vocals, guitar, Austin Brown – vocals, guitar, keyboard, Sean Yeaton – bass, vocals, and Max Savage – drums) worked with Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, Hot Chip, David Byrne) in channeling Speaking In Tongues era Talking Heads for many of the tracks here. The beats/percussion, rich bass, and total kick-ass groove propel “Marathon Of Anger”, working as a mash-up of “Naive Melody” and “Make Flippy Floppy” in the best ways possible.
The title track and “Trullo” also both successfully recall the Heads in their prime with slight afrobeat, filtered through a Lower East Side modern dance party vibe. “Plant Life” stays in this vein but rambles on a bit too long, while “Just Shadows” becomes repetitive and a touch dull, but these are the only two small missteps on an album full of excellent new approaches from the evolving quartet.
Parquet Courts can also still drop in their post-punk sound, but for tracks like “Black Widow Spider” and “Homo Sapien” the grinding guitar riffs are augmented by inventive dance-laden beats, kicking it all up a level. The industrial clanging, technology-obsessed “Application Apparatus” touches on electronica with bleeps, bangs, static and digital ghosts in the fog machine while “Zoom Out” delivers inventive and constantly danceable bass and guitar lines in exhilarating fashion.
The languid closer “Pulcinella” is the only track to ditch the dance floor and uses a slow serpentine strum before a majestic final movement, capping Sympathy For Life in perfect fashion as Parquet Courts shift gears and accelerate, blazing into the future, which is wide open.
