Parquet Courts -- Sympathy For Life: Review

Parquet Courts -- Sympathy For Life

[Rough Trade]

Is it okay to go back to parties? I mean we’re all vaccinated right? And I mean none of my friends could possibly have the Delta Variant. We’re all safe and, like, go to the grocery stores with masks on. And we’re not like those anti-maskers who don’t care about the virus--we care… right?

These are the hard-hitting questions people everywhere in the modern US currently face, when leaving the house, constantly crossing a moral tightrope and trying not to feel bad doing it. With the vaccines having guarded us for more than half a year now, we’ve learned to push that feeling down, but it’s still there, and it’s dangerous to neglect it.

Sympathy For Life is exactly about this. The two poles of this record are as follows: funky-ass grooves dancing by themselves in the dark and the unconfident awkward movements they do through shut eyes. The album channels the desperate desire to be out there again, with the people, in the streets and clubs, shaking keisters and slamming liquor; while also struggling to get back into it, the 18 months of quarantine weighing on social skills, and floundering on like a stumbling drunk.

So what do you do if you forget how to talk? Dance, baby.

This meaty dance-punk obsession didn’t come out of thin air for PC--they’ve been on the stuff for a long time. Since the catchy bops of their studio debut back in 2012, through every album’s extended jam song (I’m talking “Stoned and Starving”) as well the crusty electronic experiments peaking on their experimental EP Monastic Living, up to sharp dance-able wit of their 2018 record Wide Awake!, full blown electronics have only been an inevitability for the band.

Honestly, after nearly two years of radio silence following Wide Awake!, I wasn't sure if the band would ever come back together to even make another album. I mean, if the band were to end it here, it would be on top, with one of the greatest rock records of the 2010’s. Andrew Savage, their guitarist and frontman admitted in recent interviews: “I wasn’t sure, if we were ever gonna get there, that I would ever get back on a stage again.” Savage comments on the contemplation brought about by the pandemic: “It made me think about the lifespan of the band and, y’know, we’ve been together for 10 years, and I thought ‘Maybe that was it.’”

And even though I didn’t hear those words until just this week, I felt it all year. A deep pit in my ultra PC fanboy stomach tried to come to terms with the fact that one of my favorite bands could be breaking up, and that I’d missed it, I’d missed actually getting to see them.

But with an explosive tenth anniversary concert film just last October, returning with new haircuts, hitting their mid thirties, and announcing a countrywide tour in the summer, a long-awaited album to follow Wide Awake! was confirmed. Thank god.

Despite the disco ball intensity of the final product, the lead singles for Sympathy For Life implied an album going in a much more straightedge direction for the band. “Walking At A Downtown Pace” was packed with the kind of infectious indie punk energy that made the band a staple of modern rock. The following singles “Black Widow Spider” and “Homo Sapien” delivered, for the most part, two similarly straight-faced punk bangers.

But we get the album and it has songs with 5,6,7-minute long runtimes, beats made entirely of synth cabinets, and a distant psychedelia that resembled freak folk more than anything PC had done before. The change of pace on some of these songs can be jarring to PC fans, but after steady listens, you can find that it’s really the same old band under there. Sympathy For Life’s backbone is still rested on PC’s signature slacker vocals, three-chord melodies, and brutal repetition, which lends itself nicely to the band’s dive into dance music.

Probably the best example of this album’s experimentation is in “Plant Life”, a nearly 6-minute dance-punk banger that rides on a tapestry of loops and basslines and samples as colorful as the album’s cover. Austin Brown comes in with these floppy intercom vocals that play with beats like a cat with a toy and finally tears open for the incredibly funky chorus that struts with more swagger than any PC song ever.

The funk comes through in different ways like on the title track, which contrasts sharp guitar riffs with a beat that saunters like something out of a blaxploitation soundtrack. While this song’s groove is certainly well-produced, my money goes to “Zoom Out”, another organic funk cut that leads with more of the funk punk recipe on the last album. This song is a trip: its guitars sound like Sahara rock, while the rhythm section sounds like a Red Hots deep cut, and the vocals drift like the carefree chorus on a Parliament track. Absolutely love this song.

The album’s lyrics are a kinetic mass of dissociative anxiety ranging from fearing political tension (“Marathon of Anger”) and obtuse romantic turmoil (“Black Widow Spider”), to self-species-inflicted schadenfreude (“Homo Sapien”)--pretty on par for PC. But the album’s incongruence in its subjects come from the fact that the other half of songs are trying to smile through that pain: “Just Shadows”, “Sympathy For Life”, and “Walking At A Downtown Pace” being about this exact conflict.

It’s in this uncomfortable friction where the emotional core of the album resides. Parquet Courts just came out of an existential quarantine, contemplating whether the band would ever play again on stage. And while we know how that story ends, the existential dread of Sympathy For Life is horrifically striking.

I’d say this album’s dread is even harmful at points. The awkwardness of being back in the real world mirrors the band’s awkwardness trying to make 5-minute dance cuts. Case in point, “Application/Apparatus”, a supposedly two-sided meditation that tries to reach some explosion at the midpoint, but doesn’t pay off for the lethargic first half. “Marathon Of Anger” has a novel texture loop and a catchy chorus vocal, but shares a lengthy runtime and a drawn-out outro.

Ok, I can still give PC their chips for the growing pains experienced in exploring such a foreign sound but where this album strikes out is in its safest moments. See the 7-minute closer “Pulcinella”, which you would think to be the perfect prolonged dance closer to shut out the album, but just ends up being a lukewarm indie rock slow dance that feels like a cop out more than anything. And the worst offender is “Just Shadows”, a white cookout rock track that lacks in ambition, feeling like an antithesis to the innovation of the surrounding dance rock tracks.

Take it as you may, but the discomfort with living in a post-COVID world reflects in the band's discomfort with their new sound. It’s almost poetic how well the theme fits the flaws of the album, but whether or not it was intentional, it doesn’t stop the fact that some of these dance tracks don’t land, and the band’s retreat into their indie rock safe space can honestly come off as pathetic.

What Sympathy For Life feels like is your first party back from quarantine--Groovy, celebratory, freeing, but also awkward, on edge, traumatized, and not quite sure what to do with itself.

5.9/10.