Parquet Courts are high as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. Stoned, starving, and maybe just a little bit irritable, they're approached by a clipboard-carrying do-gooder seeking donations. "'A minute of YOUR time?'," they ask co-frontman Austin Brown, who quickly sends Mr. Greenpeace off with a snide-beyond-belief "for-GET about it" and a (questionably apropos) reminder that Socrates died in the fucking gutter. Munchie money secure, there are far more important details to attend to: roasted peanuts or Swedish fish?
Parquet cohorts Brown and Andrew Savage-- also of Fergus & Geronimo-- are slackers in an almost classical sense, conjuring up just about every post-collegiate, pre-responsibility, sativa-hoovering tendency you can think of. Their tangent-prone music flits, not always smoothly, between skittish post-punk and bedhead-riddled indie rock, a knot of Silkworm-inspired guitar tangles and insistent Wire tempos. It's wound tight but fraying at the edges. They're smart but they don't always act it. They could probably play these songs a little better if they wanted to. They're very funny, but not the kind of funny that makes you laugh much. They contradict themselves constantly. They probably wait until the afternoon to shower.
The tension between the sharp rhythms (courtesy of Savage's brother Max) and the ace fretwork is Gold's most reliable thrill; were it not for all this forward motion from the younger Savage, there's just no telling how far afield these songs would drift. Still fresh off Fergus & Geronimo's genre-hopping, indie-skewering Funky Was the State of Affairs, Savage seems considerably looser here: though F&G sometimes hew too closely to constraints of their source material, here he drops the retro studiousness and gets a little weird. Of the pair, though, Brown's the real eccentric; his outburst-riddled material slot in beautifully against Savage's anthems-in-miniature. After a while, you start to see the logic in all all their rambling deflections.
It's not much of a stretch to hear many of of indie rock's recent go-tos-- blurry edged-production, meaning-averse lyrics-- as a form of disaffection. Times are strange, the future's rarely seemed less certain, so it's pretty easy to see the haze surrounding indie rock as a sonic counterpoint to the unfixed nature of, well, everything. Parquet Courts may be potheads but they're not head-in-the-clouds escapists. And, while there's a we're-all-fucked undercurrent running through Light Up Gold's lyric sheet, Parquet Courts aren't about to take it sitting down. Mumbly highlight "Careers in Combat" speaks to a fairly uncomfortable reality: there are no more lifeguard jobs or decent gigs left, but hey, the military's always looking for warm bodies. Savage, on "Yonder is Closer to the Heart", sees the wadded receipts and spare change piled on his desk as a reminder of the mundane passage of time; later, up to his neck in "motivation neglect," he unhappily admits "these days I'm captive in this borrowed time." Light Up Gold finds Parquet Courts looking to breakout through any available means: intense reflection, resin hits, or rock'n'roll.
