Remember guitar bands, when they weren’t obsessed with cranking out weird synth atmospheres and playing along to drum loops?
Parquet Courts hark back to those glory days when all a band needed to put on a show was a couple of guitars, some high-top sneakers and bags full of energy.
Their sound clearly links back to the glory days of post-punk and turn-of-the-21st-century New York rock, with a touch of The Cribs’ snotty and untutored vocals.
The songs shifted between pure short slabs of Minutemen-style energy with insistent riffs and Andrew Savage’s hastily spat out indistinct lyrics as on Yonder Is Closer To The Heart, or hypnotic grooves, as on Racing Through The Dark or Stoned And Starving.
With their debut album Light Up Gold released last year, the band was showcasing a series of new tracks, showing the well has certainly not yet run dry.
By the end the crowd was moshing frantically and invading the stage for short bursts of crowd-surfing.
Derivative some of the sounds might be, but at the end of it all the only real response could be “Wow”.
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