The latest from Brooklyn quartet Parquet Courts is called Wide Awake!, and mostly sounds the part. At its best, the band’s fifth album is alert and immediate, with an emphasis on tight, dynamic basslines and curt, jumpy guitar. The tedious moments arise when the pace slows and the music stagnates, leaving co-lead vocalists Andrew Savage and Austin Brown inadequately supported. But in contrast to Wide Awake!’s stark lapses, there’s a bevy of gleeful mid-tempo grooves and blurting spiels, signs that the band hasn’t lost the looseness that defined their early work, even as their sonic boundaries have expanded.
On sub-two minute tracks like “NYC Observation” and “Extinction,” brevity allows Savage and Brown to have their say in concise bursts and heady streams of consciousness, the lyrics verbose and evocative. While it isn’t productive to denigrate the limitations of rock vocalists, it can be instructive to think about whether non-traditional voices add to the music or distract from it. For the most part, the pair, and particularly Savage, work their blunt instruments into a dynamic companionship with Max Savage and Sean Yeaton’s lively rhythm section. Indeed, the toneless heft of their singing adds a romantic humanity to songs like the chugging highlight and album closer, “Tenderness,” in which Andrew Savage works himself disarmingly hoarse. On the other hand, with too much room to stretch, certain songs tend to list and deflate, with said limited vocals awkwardly showcased.
If Parquet Courts is going to slow things down, they need an extra injection of grandiosity. Best exemplified by 2014’s towering “Instant Disassembly,” that element isn’t missing from Wide Awake!, but it’s lacking on the slower songs that need it the most. The results are tepid. “Back To Earth,” for instance, sounds like H. Jon Benjamin making a cameo on a Gorillaz outtake – one of the surprisingly few times when Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton’s unsettling faux-retro sheen rests too heavily. The puzzling penultimate track, “Death Will Bring Change,” with its yawning atmosphere and canned children’s choir, would’ve been better left on Stephin Merritt’s writing room floor. Slightly less of a stretch, track three, “Before the Water Gets Too High” all but inoculates its timely message with a flat instrumental that’s more processional than protest march. While that song’s socio-political indignation is well-taken, it mostly manifests in tossed off bromides that detract from the outrage. “What’s it worth, all the money we made?” and “No, time can’t be bought by the profits you make” don’t exactly crackle with activist fervor. Ironically, the song’s plodding music never rises beyond the sonic equivalent of lukewarm water lapping around the ankles. But maybe the innocuous creep and seep is the point?
But for every middling exploration, there’s at least one rousing rejoinder. Two songs after “Before the Water Gets Too High” peters out, the band is right back in its wheelhouse with the gleeful, frenetic “Almost Had to Start A Fight/In And Out of Patience.” True to its titular slash, the song switches gears about halfway through: punchy gruffness giving way to ascendant backing vocals over a clean, clipped punk instrumental. This back and forth between the band’s deadpan slacker rock and recent yen for poppier melodies makes Wide Awake! an uneven record, but not an unsatisfying one, especially when these competing tendencies collide. “Tenderness,” the aforementioned closer, along with the gently streaming “Mardi Gras Beads,” and the big, joyful “Freebird II” show that Parquet Courts’ present is best left tethered to its past.