Don't you love it when bands not only live up to but exceed your expectations? I was looking forward to seeing Brooklyn's Parquet Courts for a while, having missed them when they played at 529 back in May 2013, but still hadn't expected them to be as terrific as they were last night, even though I don't think that they cared much for us.
Atlanta hardcore bands Uniform and Predator opened. Both bands shared the same Marshall amps and fondness for a loud, wall-of-noise approach to their music. The opener (I don't recall which band was which) had a terrific drummer, but other than that I couldn't distinguish much of one instrument from the other under all that sound. On the positive side, though, they both played short sets with not much time in between, letting headliners Parquet Courts take the stage before 10:30 pm.
After the Marshall amps were carted offstage and Parquet Courts had started their set, my initial surprise was at how relatively quiet they sounded compared to the volume before them. Not that they didn't play with passion and intensity, but they apparently didn't need to blast the audience out of The Earl from the very first. Not too worry, though, the volume crept up throughout the set, and by the time I left for home after the show, my ears were ringing.
In fact, the entire Parquet Courts set seemed calibrated to work the audience into a frenzy by building up in intensity and recklessness as the night when on. They started out by playing songs like Bodies Made Of (the second song of their set) and the almost folk-rockish Instant Disassembly. with a few punk-rock anthems thrown in between.
But as the evening when on, they got louder and more intense, with more noise-rock and thrash thrown into the set, and by the time they got to Ducking and Dodging, it was even more electrifying and exciting than the recorded version even suggests.
Parquet Courts seem to have mastered the kind of hard-charging indie punk that Thee Oh Sees popularized, music I like to think of as what I'd like to be hearing if I were driving a car at 90 miles per hour off of a cliff.
Rebel: there were signs posted all over The Earl with only the single, simple rule of "No Flash Photography," and then the flash goes off accidentally on my phone as I'm taking a picture. It was cool and nobody so much as flinched, but dagnabbit, one simple rule and I can't seem to keep it.
Parquet Courts seemed a little annoyed that there wasn't more crowd-surfing and head-banging going on in the audience, despite their best efforts to whip everybody up into a frenzy. "You can start moving around anytime you want," Andrew Savage advised at one point, but for the most part, the audience just stood in place bobbing their heads or jumping up and down in place.
The set ended with a sustained feedback and thrash frenzy that recalled Yo La Tango at their wooliest, transcending all genres and rational meaning like Ascension-period John Coltrane.
There was no encore, even though they hadn't yet played Stoned and Starving, due to the lackluster applause at the end of their set. But in our defense, it was a bit confusing as the music came on over the P.A. system as soon as the band left the stage, although the lights stayed low. Would there be an encore or not? we wondered, but no one led the audience in a spirited call, and eventually the lights came on.
So we may have disappointed the band, but they sure didn't disappoint us. There's a certain rush from the combination of serotonin and adrenalin that bands like this cause to be formed in my brain, and right now no one's bringing it on harder and more artfully than Parquet Courts.
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