Sunbathing Animal by Parquet Courts (review)

 Back in 2014, I wrote about a dozen record reviews for a website called Buzz and Howl. It was later hacked and disappeared into the ether. This is one in a series of posts intended to preserve that work, unedited.

Parquet Courts, Sunbathing Animal

I’ve been listening to Parquet Courts’ new record Sunbathing Animal for a few weeks now, and every time I do, a particular scene from a thirty year old movie keeps floating around in my brain. In Repo Man, the main character Otto starts out as a punk but soon suits up to perform the titular profession. At one point he runs into some of his old punk friends at a sleazy lounge and finds that he can’t identify with them at all anymore. In the background, the Circle Jerks are performing a slow, acoustic version of their song “When the Shit Hits the Fan,” and at one point Otto looks over and says, “I can’t believe I used to like these guys.”

Now that might sound like I mean it as an insult, but I definitely don’t. It’s not that Otto realizes that the band sucks--it’s that he has become such a different person that he doesn’t recognize the guy who used to listen to them. When a work of art so perfectly captures for the listener a moment in time and a feeling about that moment, it becomes forever wedded to it, and to the version of you that experienced it, a you that is now gone. I’ll never be able to hear Sublime’s weird Gershwin redux “Doin’ Time” without feeling my teenaged self lying on my back on a hot trampoline, t-shirt soaked from a rampaging water-fight, and thinking about all those lost friends I experienced that moment with. I haven’t seen any of those people since that summer, and I haven’t been that version of me since then either.

In precisely the same way, I don’t think I’ll be able to hear Sunbathing Animal ten years from now without thinking about my first summer in New York, with the humidity of the subway at three AM lulling me to sleep, then getting back on the train bleary-eyed a few hours later to get to work, Parquet Courts in the earbuds the only thing keeping me awake. And I wonder if, thinking back from this hypothetical future, I’ll recognize this younger, stupider version of me. Or will I think, as I certainly do of Sublime now, “I can’t believe I used to like these guys”?

I’m not saying you have to be young to appreciate this record--hell, I ain’t as young as I used to be, I’ve got five years on PC’s frontman Andrew Savage--but it helps to be in a period of your life that feels legendary, that you’re somehow already feeling nostalgic for. My favorite track on the record is the one about a mysterious lady that you can’t quite pin down, “Dear Ramona.” Small details perfectly capture that mid-twenties, free-floating social milieu that just about all the world’s indie bands exist in: “This daughter’s saving up commissions from acting/but no one’s ever seen her play/She fixes breakfast for two in the morning/and drinks dark coffee at night/whoever she might be goin’ to bed with/you can read about that in her Moleskin.” The tired-of-touring lament “Always Back in Town” similarly describes a recognizable part of life at that age, in that scene: “...always making amends/always staying clean… always feed my cat/And I’m always packing my bags/I’m always back in town (according to you).”

The comparisons to Pavement I’ve been hearing about Parquet Courts make a lot of sense: smart and sloppy, playful but not unserious. If you were there when they were around, you could grow up with Pavement, maturing along with each new release. And I think it could come to pass for Parquet Courts that they will have the same kind of trajectory. So maybe their fans won’t be looking back ten years from now and thinking, “I can’t believe I ever liked these guys,” but instead thinking, “I can’t believe these are the same guys.” Because they’ll be different, and we’ll be different.