Sometimes I can’t tell if I keep coming back to this album because it appears to be written by a bunch of guys with opinions, anxieties, and frustrations nearly identical to my own, or if it’s actually any good. I don’t even know man, maybe it’s still just wild to me that this thing was produced by Danger Mouse.

As in touch with the uncomfortability of trying hard and earnestly to live as any album in recent memory, Parquet Courts’ Wide Awake! is a stew-y guided meditation on the sheer anxiety born from simply existing during the 21st century. This mix of trepidation, ennui, and occasional revolutionary zeal pairs perfectly with the dread that comes with getting by while being unflinchingly aware of the material reality of those with less than yourself.

And I say this because it is clear throughout even a passing listen that frontman Andrew Savage’s gravelly and shouty first-person narration operates from a position of acknowledged privilege. The album is best read as coming from a place of broad-strokes leftism and – as titled – is concerned with trying to find out what it means in practice to be ‘woke’ (the answer: ew). 

The opener, ‘Total Football’, carries a passing-car view of this concern. As its call-but-no-response chorus bursts through the mix, the song establishes the album’s core of distilled, well-read and well-reasoned white and male angst. It’s an effective and self-aware manifesto – it’s like if IDLES had read Gramsci. Savage also shouts “fuck Tom Brady” at the end, which I personally just think is neat. Savage has stated to media that it’s a derision at large of the idea of the quarterback, the hyper-individualised adonis of ‘praise the lord and pass the ammunition’ Americana - a natural enemy of the version of collectivism embodied by total football itself. 

‘Total Football’ sets a standard of personal and political frankness for the remaining tracks to come. ‘Violence’ brings with it a view on living as a violent act, touching on forced participation in late-stage capitalism and violence as a rational reaction to the state of things. Aside from its right-to-rebel lyrics, ‘Violence’ harbours a slappy lead clavinet riff and stabs of Hammond Organ in the verse, building a slow and warped tension until the bridge finally lets the organ run away in a moment of much needed respite.

‘Before the Water Gets Too High’ is a fittingly disaffected traipse through what the climate crisis may mean to the average individual, set to dinky drum machines and yet another tight bassline. While not as biting as the songs around it, it also begins to shift the lyrical focus of the track list from the world at large to what goes on upstairs when having to cope as a passenger through so many competing circles of hell.

Through the mid-album triple feature highlight of ‘Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience’ and ‘Freebird II’, Savage paces through the professed unshakable nightmare of living before resolving to just getting on with things regardless, trying to try his best in hope of one day finding a slice of freedom to call his own.

‘Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience’ is a two-header that seems to have been written immediately after a conversation that has left Savage needing to balance a personal commitment to non-violence with a burning desire to kick the other party’s head in. These tracks tap in to the kind of tiresome frustration with the ignorant that’s usually reserved for mid-Christmas lunch smokos and drinks with friends from home who feel a need to share their two cents on why Conor McGregor should run for the Presidency of Ireland. But then suddenly there’s the flip-side, a creeping feeling that maybe ignorance really is bliss and is worth giving a try.

Reaching the point where he starts to doubt the virtue of a search for reason, it seems as if Savage starts to forget the core beliefs and values that have lead him to this point in the first place, his reasons are “eclipsed by tension” and distilled down to a want to “not feel numb about death”. Immediately before the switch into ‘In and Out of Patience’, a realisation dawns that the machine was always going to win out, but that living without a progressive fire in one’s belly would be akin to a bad dream. Over guitars that borrow heavily from the CBGB era of proto and post-punk, Savage rues the fact that his total loss of patience with those around him means that he’s not exactly fun at parties anymore but finds solace in knowing that his internal soundtrack goes kind of hard. 

Despite the coping-with-daily-horrors-cum-listlessness that occupies the majority of Wide Awake!, there are some moments of fun to be had on the album, chief among them the mere existence of ‘Freebird II’. Conceptually, writing a follow-up to ‘Freebird’ is an 11/10 bit, and is one that has aged well with the ever-growing memetic value of the original. In execution, Parquet Courts lift the organ and borrow chords from Lynyrd Skynyrd while keeping the break-up theme rolling in the lyrics. As is fitting with the album’s general outlook, the band does away with the Confederate Flag toting, losing the ol’ ball and chain garishness of ‘Freebird’ and instead give their gratitude to an old relationship, acknowledging the beauty and tenderness that was once held but moving on anyway.

Introduced as if at a gig at the end of ‘In and Out of Patience’, the track moves through the alienness of having to do things like stop calling an ex by the names you gave them, and notes that that’s kind of gross to begin with. By its end, ‘Freebird II’ pays the central breakup its due as a spate of pub-choir harmonies revel in the self-actualisation that has generously been gifted to the narrator by way of being forced to let go. Like I said, super duper fun.

It’s hard to not engage at least passively in some haha-that-is-literally-so-me-ism when listening to Wide Awake!, especially when you clock the academic root of one of Savage’s witticisms or can imagine yourself just as adrift in the world as his narrator. But his perspective is nothing if not well-interrogated, the project’s self-reflective core is thoroughly spelled out on tracks like ‘Normalization’, ‘Extinction’, ‘Death Will Bring Change’ and the title track itself.

Wide Awake! jacks its auxiliary percussion straight from forebears like Talking Heads’ Fear of Music and LCD Soundsytem’s self-titled debut, and pokes at the self-righteousness that we (the royal version) run the risk of indulging in as card-carrying members of what is derided as the woke class. ‘Extinction’ follows this trend by interrogating whether one’s passion for left politics emanates from self-service rather than wanting more for the collective, and scorns the kind of nit-picking psychopathy and factionalism that perceived false activists are wont to indulge in. These tracks earn their keep as a flare against the tribalistic misuse of idpol, doing so by staring down the barrel of just how good it feels to be right, to be part of something, to be better than the bigoted hoard trying to knock the door off its hinges.

These self-criticisms allow the album to earn the conclusions its rhetoric reaches on tracks like ‘Back to Earth’ and ‘Tenderness’, without resorting to the kind of corniness into which it risks straying. Music espousing that love is the answer can be tired, but Savage and bandmate Austin Brown, whose lead vocals are a standout on ‘Back to Earth’, never make it seem like they’re about to get their kits off and pose foetally next to Yoko. Parquet Courts’ version of peace and love (peace and love) is a commitment to tenderness and care however flawed it may be, but always willing to learn and forever conscious of the reality outside its four walls – much closer to ‘Shelter From the Storm’ than ‘Imagine’.

‘Tenderness’ calls back to the flirtations with ignorance seen earlier on ‘In and Out of Patience’ and in doing so makes arguably the album’s finest lyrical offering. As the track winds down, Savage proclaims that “nothing reminds the mind of power like the cheap odour of plastic / leaking fumes we crave, consume, the rush it feels fantastic / but like power turns to mould, like a junkie going cold / I need the fix, of a little tenderness”. This resignation that mindlessness and apathy would cheat us of any real attempt at finding something true and beautiful neatly packs away the idea that simply not giving a shit could help in the search for inner peace.

‘Tenderness’ also resolves one of the album’s most effective instrumental motifs. Track to track, keys provide means for escape from guitars that are consistently jumpy and basslines that are almost always their own little walk-a-thon. As Savage talks self-actualisation on ‘Freebird II’, his words are met by soaring organs, and dual solos from a similarly wayward organ and a theremin-like synth play out ‘Violence’. On ‘Tenderness’, freewheeling keys affably sound as if coming from a player piano and provide a crushingly earnest finale to the project, drawing a bite-sized odyssey through the everyday to a close by way of the ivories.  

To borrow from David Berman, it’s pretty clear that the ends of what Parquet Courts have to say on Wide Awake! could’ve been lifted off of the walls of a pub bathroom. However, in getting there the band provides a nothing-if-not-honest reflection of what it means to make do in our very silly age where everything’s on fire. The album’s bare-soul brand of optimism is infectious and its hits hit big, delivering a tight package of songs best employed as a soundtrack for the drive home from a shite day at work.

81

Oliver O’Brien

28 February 2024