Live Review: Parquet Courts, The Goon Sax

When Parquet Courts got together to make their latest record, 2018’s Wide Awake!, they wanted to make a punk record that you could dance to, and judging by the endlessly moving crowd at Marrickville’s sweltering Factory Theatre: mission accomplished. And then some.

The critical theory punks have long made hypertense music for hypertense men, often sung through co-frontman Andrew Savage’s pressured speech, with a tremendous sense of urgency; a hurried need to be as earnest as possible as quickly as possible, so it’s no surprise that the sell-out crowd that turned out to see them is largely male-dominated.

Though the look of these men varied from shredders who wouldn’t be out of place at a Dunies show to old blokes you’d see watching James Reyne down at the Caringbah RSL, there is a commonality between them and the rest of the audience: this is the place for earnest punks to come and get down.

Brisbane’s The Goon Sax open to decent numbers and ride the dolewave through a lackadaisical yet dynamic (thanks to some confident, assured and emphatic drumming from Riley Jones) set of guitar-pop that sees people a-swayin’ like they’re in the crowd at Homerpalooza. Though not the upsetting, too online kind, they’re clearly millennials, James Harrison exuding a charmingly nervous energy and Louis Forster (son of the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster) pausing at one point to tune his guitar with his iPhone. He cuts a commanding figure – as if Jack Ladder took style tips from 1999 Eminem.

The volume and energy knobs take a huge upturn as Parquet Courts enter, thrashing about wildly but somehow sounding tighter than ever, the relevance of opener Total Football’s closing line, “...and fuck Tom Brady” not lost on the crowd who bellow along in the wake of his recent Super Bowl win.

Much of the praise levelled at Parquet Courts often falls to frontmen and chief songwriters Andrew Savage and Austin Brown, but the value of bassist Sean Yeaton and drummer Max Savage cannot be understated. The former’s thundering low-end and dynamic playing style and the latter’s taut precision drumming add another dimension to their sound, especially in the live setting, with a blistering rendition of Human Performance opener Dust sounding absolutely huge.

The set heavily favours last year’s record, nine of its 13 tracks getting a run and equal adoration from the crowd as old classics like the Light Up Gold one-two of Master Of My Craft and Borrowed Time, the transition between which may be the best in music since side B of Abbey Road and the crowd lets them know it.

They perform with a tonne of gusto, Savage surely doing serious damage to his vocal cords, drenched in sweat inside “the cloud of steam” they were performing in, Brown dancing and grooving away with the look of a ‘60s British psychedelia pioneer – and the sound of one during a soaring, 18-minute (yep!) rendition of One Man No City that sent the show into the stratosphere and never came close to dragging.

In a world of online irony poisoning, theirs is a refreshing brand of sincerity that is surely meant for bigger stages and sound systems. Dancefloors the world over be wary.