A decade ago, North Shore native Sean Yeaton was touring with his Boston band Daniel Striped Tiger when they played a show at the suburban Dallas home of Andrew Savage, a fellow traveler in the DIY punk underground. In 2010, after they’d each relocated to Brooklyn, Savage called Yeaton to ask him to join a new band.
“We moved to New York for the same reason a lot of people our age moved to New York, ’cause it was a cultural freak zone,” Yeaton says. “That’s where you could go and have a job working for a moving company or an internship at a magazine, and then be in a band at night.”
In fact, Yeaton had just finished an internship at Spin magazine. Four years later, Spin named Parquet Courts—the group the two launched with Savage’s younger brother Max and Texas college friend Austin Brown—Band of the Year behind 2014’s critically acclaimed Sunbathing Animal.
“I didn’t know people actively working [at Spin then], but that was huge for me,” says bassist Yeaton, 30, recalling when Parquet Courts played SXSW and he ran into people who had been on Spin’s editorial team during his internship. “I got to see them as people who were fans of my band and not just someone to get coffee for.”
But Parquet Courts, who play the Paradise Rock Club on April 15, have little interest in hobnobbing. The group has long avoided lucrative licensing deals for its music and lacks any social media presence. Andrew Savage still uses a flip-phone.
“I have my own personal Twitter account and Instagram, but very rarely do I try to make those things about the band, because I just like to be a guy who happens to be in a band, but I also have other stuff in my life that I’m proud of,” Yeaton says on his way into a McDonald’s in Philadelphia (“I can’t afford to live in New York anymore”) to buy a Shamrock Shake with his wife and young son. “We just want to be a band that gives people music that they’re happy to listen to. We’re not trying to be anything other than the four personalities you hear on our records.”
Those personalities blossom on Human Performance, an April 8 release that’s the band’s most diversified and deftly honed statement yet—the result of a yearlong recording jaunt that brought Yeaton and drummer Max Savage into both songwriting and vocal roles alongside guitarists Brown and Andrew Savage.
“We probably recorded and learned enough songs to make up five different-sounding LPs,” Yeaton says of the sessions, which also yielded last November’s mainly instrumental Monastic Living, an EP of noise-drone experimentation.
In contrast, Human Performance finds the band at its most accessible, expanding on post-Velvet
Underground influences for an identity that’s somehow both more scattered and solidified. It ranges from the yearning strum of the title track (on which Andrew Savage sings, “I told you I loved you / Did I even deserve it when you returned it?” in a Jonathan Richman-like drawl) to Yeaton’s “I Was Just Here,” a jerky, robotic string of associative phrases with a punk-rock coda, evoking Wire and Devo.
And, in fact, those aforementioned bands were all “churning through our skulls when we were working on this record,” Yeaton says. “This record has done the best in being pretty transparent about the bands that we obviously like.”
Other highlights on the album include “One Man, No City” (where producer Brown’s dispirited musings over a squiggly groove sound like beatnik Pavement filtered through Krautrock), Andrew Savage’s shifty travelogue “Berlin Got Blurry” and the jangle-punk “Two Dead Cops,” a careening shout at inner-city conflicts.
Yeaton provides a melodic anchor to the guitarists’ own gnashing crossfire throughout, adhering to Max Savage’s taut beats, which “allows Austin and Andrew to fly off the handle,” says Yeaton, formerly a guitarist who played in a similar style before joining Parquet Courts. “I’d never played bass before, and I didn’t expect it to turn into anything,” he says. “And here we are now.”
Parquet Courts play the Paradise Rock Club on April 15.
Human Evolution
Brooklyn post-punk iconoclasts settle into heady new grooves.
A decade ago, North Shore native Sean Yeaton was touring with his Boston band Daniel Striped Tiger when they played a show at the suburban Dallas home of Andrew Savage, a fellow traveler in the DIY punk underground. In 2010, after they’d each relocated to Brooklyn, Savage called Yeaton to ask him to join a new band.
“We moved to New York for the same reason a lot of people our age moved to New York, ’cause it was a cultural freak zone,” Yeaton says. “That’s where you could go and have a job working for a moving company or an internship at a magazine, and then be in a band at night.”
In fact, Yeaton had just finished an internship at Spin magazine. Four years later, Spin named Parquet Courts—the group the two launched with Savage’s younger brother Max and Texas college friend Austin Brown—Band of the Year behind 2014’s critically acclaimed Sunbathing Animal.
“I didn’t know people actively working [at Spin then], but that was huge for me,” says bassist Yeaton, 30, recalling when Parquet Courts played SXSW and he ran into people who had been on Spin’s editorial team during his internship. “I got to see them as people who were fans of my band and not just someone to get coffee for.”
But Parquet Courts, who play the Paradise Rock Club on April 15, have little interest in hobnobbing. The group has long avoided lucrative licensing deals for its music and lacks any social media presence. Andrew Savage still uses a flip-phone.
“I have my own personal Twitter account and Instagram, but very rarely do I try to make those things about the band, because I just like to be a guy who happens to be in a band, but I also have other stuff in my life that I’m proud of,” Yeaton says on his way into a McDonald’s in Philadelphia (“I can’t afford to live in New York anymore”) to buy a Shamrock Shake with his wife and young son. “We just want to be a band that gives people music that they’re happy to listen to. We’re not trying to be anything other than the four personalities you hear on our records.”
Those personalities blossom on Human Performance, an April 8 release that’s the band’s most diversified and deftly honed statement yet—the result of a yearlong recording jaunt that brought Yeaton and drummer Max Savage into both songwriting and vocal roles alongside guitarists Brown and Andrew Savage.
“We probably recorded and learned enough songs to make up five different-sounding LPs,” Yeaton says of the sessions, which also yielded last November’s mainly instrumental Monastic Living, an EP of noise-drone experimentation.
In contrast, Human Performance finds the band at its most accessible, expanding on post-Velvet
Underground influences for an identity that’s somehow both more scattered and solidified. It ranges from the yearning strum of the title track (on which Andrew Savage sings, “I told you I loved you / Did I even deserve it when you returned it?” in a Jonathan Richman-like drawl) to Yeaton’s “I Was Just Here,” a jerky, robotic string of associative phrases with a punk-rock coda, evoking Wire and Devo.
And, in fact, those aforementioned bands were all “churning through our skulls when we were working on this record,” Yeaton says. “This record has done the best in being pretty transparent about the bands that we obviously like.”
Other highlights on the album include “One Man, No City” (where producer Brown’s dispirited musings over a squiggly groove sound like beatnik Pavement filtered through Krautrock), Andrew Savage’s shifty travelogue “Berlin Got Blurry” and the jangle-punk “Two Dead Cops,” a careening shout at inner-city conflicts.
Yeaton provides a melodic anchor to the guitarists’ own gnashing crossfire throughout, adhering to Max Savage’s taut beats, which “allows Austin and Andrew to fly off the handle,” says Yeaton, formerly a guitarist who played in a similar style before joining Parquet Courts. “I’d never played bass before, and I didn’t expect it to turn into anything,” he says. “And here we are now.”
Parquet Courts play the Paradise Rock Club on April 15.
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