ALBUM REVIEW: Parkay Quarts ‘Content Nausea’

Parquet Courts frontmen Andrew Savage and Austin Brown crash out a homemade album of oddball, garage punk paranoia that bristles and scowls at the modern world.
Rating:
Rating:

As hype grew and Parquet Courts became the discerning name to drop, their breakthrough album Light Up Gold (2012) was dismissed in some quarters as cynical Brooklyn hipsters, regurgitating tired garage rock riffs for the VICE generation. It always seemed an unfair, misguided charge. They struck more as pimply, grease-face, Napoleon Dynamite geeks crashing around in their basement listening to Replacements and Pavement records and hiding away from a world that confused and scared the hell out of them. And what’s not like about that?

After follow-up Sunbathing Animal (2014) delivered more slices of lo-fi, oddball punk adrenalin, joint frontmen Andrew Savage and Austin Brown have now ditched their bandmates for a year-ending hurrah that hints at future turns of direction. Released under the name Parkay Quarts and recorded in two weeks on a humble four-track machine, Content Nausea sits somewhere between a side project experiment, a rarity compilation and the sort of demo album The Libertines used to randomly post online just for the hell of it. Whatever the concept though, there are enough scratchy gems and rambling throwaways to keep ardent fans bouncing through the winter months.

Title track Content Nausea is one of them. Galloping along under frantic paranoia, Savage gives a ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’ rant that rages with frazzled bemusement rather than sulky anger, and ends up sounding like Alan Ginsberg fronting Crass. Elsewhere opener Everyday It Starts is a collage of monotone, suburban insomnia that channels Devo’s analogue futurism, Insufferable marches and screeches to Mark E Smith’s muzzled, rampant indifference and Pretty Machines could be a lost Lou Reed classic from the Velvet Underground’s more beat friendly period. Most striking though is the closer Uncast Shadow of a Southern Man, a dark, countrified murder ballad which summons Nick Cave, Johnny Cash and Jeffrey Lee Peirce and reveals an arch songwriting talent that is usually hidden beneath the scrawling slacker rock.

It’s always said that The Pixies were proof that nerds and outsiders make the most interesting records, and Parquet Courts follow some of that lineage. They were miscast as surly, disenfranchised, Black Lips-cast offs and though, at times they become an exercise in grungey, lank-haired nostalgia, their record collector obsessiveness takes us to place well beyond revivalism or scenester posturing. And even if Content Nausea is merely a homemade pissabout to pass the time, it still sounds more rabid and vital than most of the post-punk indie landfill often served up.

 

 

Kevin Irwin

Kevin Irwin

Kevin Irwin

Latest posts by Kevin Irwin (see all)