Parkay Quarts
Content Nausea
11 November 2014
What’s Your Rupture?
4 stars out of 5
“Ignore this part, it’s an advertisement. These people are
famous, I trust ‘em.” Not content with over-stimulating your intellectual rock
receptors with Sunbathing Animal, the
fantastically brainy and spectacularly shambling LP that Parquet Courts
released just half a year ago, the band decided to quickly record a follow-up—in
two weeks, on four-track cassette—and release it under the guise of their
secret identity, Parkay Quarts. There’s no stylistic difference between the two
incarnations of the band—it’s still that glorious intersection between The Velvet Underground & Nico and EVOL that is simultaneously so warmly
endearing and coldly postmodern. And the recording quality is surprisingly good
considering the decades-old technology used to produce it.
The title track is a manifesto of poetry against the
machine, featuring the lines at the beginning of this review. “The Map” could
be a lost Lee Ranaldo song-poem from mid-‘80s Sonic Youth. And then there’s the
cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots,” which is a reasonably faithful
reconstruction of the original, complete with horn section, before falling
apart into feedback and pure noise at the end. Throw around whatever slurs you
like—cynical, contrived, inauthentic, hipster—but you can’t deny that Content Nausea is a great collection of
vibrant songs and inspired performances that demands continuous relistening.
reviewed by Richard Krueger
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