Album Review: Parquet Courts - Human Performance

NYC four-piece Parquet Courts have bounced back from the wilful dissonance of 2015's largely-instrumental Monastic Living EP with their most straightforward album to date, although coming from these garage-tinged post-punks it's still far from conventional.

They've always been prolific, yet their fractured aesthetic has never been throwaway, and Human Performance (recorded concurrently with Monastic Living) represents the band's most concerted creative effort, springing from a full year of writing and recording by all four members.

There's an inherent vitality to Parquet Courts' music, but here it favours personal reflection over propulsion, the arrangements reined-in slightly but fully realised and with plenty happening in the margins. The vistas are dominated by the often-dark worldview of frontman Andrew Savage whose pained quest seems deeper than existential, his tortured lyrics stripping away all vestiges of artifice to expose the core of the human condition. Dust opens with a honed burst of anxiety (over a killer groove) before the title track details a broken relationship with damaged, disarming honesty, while the epic One Man No City — a diatribe about solitude at home — nestles next to Berlin Got Blurry's analysis of loneliness abroad (atop almost pop rhythms). Pathos Prairie is a scarred deconstruction of nature versus nurture, while melancholic closer It's Gonna Happen yearns achingly for authenticity (the howled "I'm not an imposter" particularly piquant).

Intelligent introspection of deceptive depth and considerable charm.