Hear Parquet Courts’ Human Performance Centerpiece

Most of Parquet Courts‘ songs are about some kind of disconnect: between expectation and reality, social pressures and priorities. But seldom have we heard them shoot so directly at heartbreak, every other songwriter’s favorite rupture. The title track of their forthcoming album finds Andrew Savage in the wake of a break-up, wracked with self-doubt. He’s singing as we’ve never heard him before, reeling in his usual jut-jawed bark and coming out with a surprising, blunted croon that recalls Orange Juice‘s Edwyn Collins. Its art brut quality makes the unusually childlike, simple rhymes of “Human Performance” feel all the more canny and affecting.

“So few are trials when a life isn’t lonely/ And now if only,” Savage sighs, the tiny aside trapping mordant humor and regret with a poacher’s precision. He tries to turn his apartment into a mausoleum, since “nothing moves without drifting into memory,” but it’s futile. Savage knows that his pain isn’t going anywhere any time soon: “It never leaves me/ Just visits less often/ It isn’t gone and I won’t feel its grip soften/ Without a coffin.”

It’s also the straightest song Parquet Courts have written. The dulled bass thrum captures all Savage’s resignation, while the bright guitar that blooms at the start of each verse feels like another new dawn for him to deal with, time blithely passing as he lingers in his self-made purgatory. The concept of “human performance” evokes productivity measures—the kind of dehumanizing quote-unquote progress that Savage reels from in many of his lyrics. “Human Performance” is a different vibe for Parquet Courts, but the total inefficiency of heartache is as good a protest against the machine as any.

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