On the cover of his debut solo album, Parquet Courts singer/guitarist Andrew Savage can be seen lounging on a bed, acoustic guitar in hand, bathed in sepia tone. Beside him is an open book—Modern Moral Philosophy—that’s nobody’s idea of a light read, and a dirty ashtray that suggests many hours spent trying to channel its ideas into song. At first glance, you could mistake it for a photo of pre-fame Bob Dylan from 1961, an intimate snapshot of a genius at work in the cozy, shabby-chic environs of an aged New York City apartment. If you asked a computer program to generate a photo for a solo singer/songwriter album, it would probably spit out something like this.
But if Thawing Dawn’s exterior presentation seems obvious compared to Parquet Courts’ gallery of cryptic collages, it proves to be no less obfuscating. As is the case with so many of his songs, nothing is ever really what it appears to be on the surface. With Parquet Courts, Savage has mastered the art of both oblique songs that prove deeply resonant, and songs that are so literal, they’re confounding. Certainly, Thawing Dawn finds Savage singing more openly and intimately about love and relationships in quieter, more rustic settings, his main band’s frantic post-punk pulse massaged into gentle piano rolls and gorgeous pedal-steel sweeps. (The smart money pegs his favorite Pavement song as “Father to a Sister of Thought.”) But it is at once the most traditional-sounding and sonically anarchic recording Savage has attempted, one that counters its countrypolitan serenades with meditative tone poems and dissonant sound-scraping. That acoustic guitar he’s holding on the cover? It’s nothing more than a photo prop.
Savage is the sort of songwriter who insulates himself from the chaos and indignities of the outside world by retreating into the comfort of his own neuroses. On Parquet Courts’ previous album, Human Performance, he wrote a song about the actual murder of two policemen in his Brooklyn neighborhood; he and co-songwriter Austin Brown also sung about the soul-crushing futility of household cleaning as if it were a Kafkaesque psychodrama. Thawing Dawn is likewise a deeply personal album that nonetheless absorbs the tremors of an unsettled, divided America—fitting for a record made by a Red State exile who lives in New York. A cavalry of Savage’s music-scene buds from Brooklyn and London (members of Woods, EZTV, Ultimate Painting, and the current iteration of Psychic TV) are charged with recreating the sounds of the South from a ruminative distance.
Savage even goes so far as to set the scene with a historical flashback that reverberates into the present. “Buffalo Calf Road” is a Southern-rock retelling of Custer’s Last Stand that reorients the narrative around Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne warrior credited by her nation with striking the blow that knocked the U.S. army commander off his horse. But while the song is rife with period detail, the themes cataloged within—capitalist greed, resource exploitation, the displacement of Indigenous people—could very well be dispatches from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. And when the song’s heroic chorus recounts Custer’s fatal fall, it feels like a clarion call for the toppling of patriarchy. Call it the “Uncast Shadow of a Northern Myth.”
But from this widescreen, Oscar-worthy vantage, Thawing Dawn zeroes in on the minutiae and malcontent of modern life. There’s the bleary, bloodshot-visioned misfit of “Eyeballs” who’s afraid of losing his (presumably California-bound) girlfriend to “juicing” and “jogging,” or the downcast narrator of “Indian Style” who’s sending apologies by text message. On these winsome turns, Savage’s drawl works within a limited range of sing-speak, but it’s far from a blunt, deadpan instrument—it quavers with both charming self-deprecation and genuine ache. And the calmer he gets, the more heartfelt he sounds: the ambient electrical-storm crackle of the eerily still “Wild, Wild, Wild Horses” only makes his plainspoken declarations of devotion sound more resolute, like someone standing their ground in a windswept open field even as the flickers of lightning in the distance creep perilously closer.
In moments like these, Thawing Dawn, in its own peculiar way, speaks soundly to our current condition—that, in the face of all the unrelenting awfulness playing out in our newsfeeds on a daily basis (and the paralyzing sense of helplessness it engenders), all you can do is hold onto your loved ones a little tighter. Or, of course, there’s always drinking. On the epic “Ladies From Houston,” Savage slowly sashays through a series of party conversations with Leonard Cohen elegance, before talk eventually turns to a certain “televised demon” and “the sadness I feel when he pollutes the screen.” He opts to drown his despair in a discarded half-empty beer can “so it doesn’t get wasted.”
But Thawing Dawn doesn’t always navigate the world with such humility and grace: the bluesy grind “What Do I Do” alternates between existential koans and cathartic blasts of spark-shooting guitar squall, however, the song has already hammered its point three minutes into its eight-minute lurch. And the closing title track is less the album’s grand finale than its battle royale, with Savage’s mind bouncing between sentiments both personal (“I need you wildly as the blue jay needs a tune it can sing into the afternoon”) and political (“Most religion is as far from faith/As the sun is from the shadows it shapes”). Shifting abruptly between a downhome Harvest groove, solitary electric-folk serenades, a loopy piano-pounded reprise of “Eyeballs,” and a Wurlitzer-powered riff on “House of the Rising Sun,” the song is a would-be honky-prog Abbey Road suite, albeit with adjoining screws left purposely loose.
But just as the Beatles did on “The End,” Savage leaves us with a peaceful closing meta commentary: “Of all the pieces I’ve combined/Still the cruelest mixture yet/Is the softness of the thawing dawn and the hardness of regret.” Accordingly, in its wobbly balance of tender introspection and topical exposition, Thawing Dawn is a handy guide for keeping your cool as the world degenerates into a hot mess.
