Parkay Quarts: "Content Nausea"

“Content Nausea” begins with a jittery power chord strum, evoking fingers nervously drumming a study-hall desk, or eyeballs vibrating in their sockets. The drum roll is clumsy and distracted, the paradiddle of a high school marching band. There’s not much else to focus on here, the title track of the latest (slightly pseudonymous) release from Parquet Courts. Which is just as well, because even a single stray note would be mauled by the verbal torrent that leader Andrew Savage unleashes here. Pressured speech is a Parquet Courts trademark, but on “Content Nausea” the words evacuate Savage’s mouth.

The gripes, sidelong observations and bitter complaints—”Too much data, too much tension/ Too much plastic, too much glass”—are forceful and bracing and, as they accumulate, a little sickening. Savage’s theme is well-worn. We’re all overloaded by digital information, we don’t know what to do with it or where to put it, and we are all “more connected and more alone.” But his delivery ratchets up the emotional stakes, and by the end, he’s drilled into a well of emotional paydirt: “This year it became harder to be tender/ Harder and harder to remember/ Meeting a friend, writing a letter, being lost.” The effect is stunning and exhausting.

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