Week of 11/3: Parquet Courts and Cloakroom
It's just the dudes today. Eli writes about "boyfriend music" and Michael gushes about a "perfect" autumn song.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him), Eric Bennett (they/them), Michael Brooks (he/him) and Miranda Reinert (she/her). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. On Substack, we’re also a weekly roundup of songs. Our format is simple: each of our four hosts picks a song they love and writes about it. There will be one free post every week, and more at the end of every month for paid subscribers. For the sake of your wallet, don’t start a paid subscription on Substack. Instead, sign up at the 2$ tier or higher on Patreon and we will gift you a subscription.
Parquet Courts - “Walking at a Downtown Pace”
Eli Enis:
In case you don’t follow me on Twitter, I was recently denigrated by my cohosts (and supposed friends) for listening to so-called “boyfriend music.” That’s how Miranda flippantly described the band Parquet Courts when I asked if we wanted to review their new album, Sympathy for Life, on our humble podcast, and both Eric and Michael oh so viciously followed suit. I was ridiculed. I was stricken. I was made to feel like my identity as a boyfriend supersedes my identity as a twenty-something dude who works in metal media, hosts a music podcast, owns multiple Duster albums on vinyl, and has attended one of Chapo Trap House’s live shows. Does that sound like “boyfriend” shit to you?
But I’ll be damned if I don’t get to voice my opinion on Parquet Courts within the confines of an Endless Scroll property. And to be honest, doing it here might be more pleasant than having to hear my cohosts let out exasperated sighs and mutter about how they “don’t get” the appeal of a band of chin-strokingly clever East Coast urbanites who worship the Velvet Underground, Pavement, the Minutemen and Funkadelic. What’s there not to get? On the real, though, I feel like Parquet Courts are almost at a point right now where they’re critically underrated (I’m using critic here as a catch-all for actual music critics and people who care about what music critics think in 2021 — so, like, message board people, Twitter commenters, etc.), or at least viewed by people who aren’t already on-board as, “Oh, that shit that was cool to like six years ago?”
Almost every indie band will get there at some point, as younger waves of fans and critics reject whatever the previous class merited as “cool,” and being eight albums into their career and in their mid-thirties, Parquet Courts have certainly reached that point. The barrier to entry feels steep, and what they’re making isn’t on the cutting edge of rock music right now. That said, I do think what they have done and continue to do is considerably more interesting, fresh, insightful, fun, musically impressive and listenable than most other “post-punk” bands of our time. They have the whole art-school-grad pretention that lends itself to making smart, stripped-back-but-not-raw rock music for people who consider themselves members of a certain intellectual echelon, but they’re not making snobby, naval-gazing bullshit that has no business being played outside of uncomfortably angular coffee shops.
Their lyrics have always been just literate, socially observant, and politically provocative enough for their own good without losing their humble, stoney sense of humor. But musically, they’ve always been committed to the groove more than anything else. From the punk urgency of Light Up Gold and the sprawling jams of Sunbathing Animal, to the taut busywork soundtracks of Human Performance (including a legitimately club-worthy knocker about dust) and the combative funk-punk tirades of Wide Awake!, they’ve always been making get-up-and-go music with the soul of a big comfy chair in a library filled with anarchist theory manuals. Usually those two sensibilities clash horribly because the band are either cornballs who aren’t as sharp as they think they are, or too musically redundant to put together a compelling album, but Parquet Courts are the “Porque no los dos?” meme exception, and they’ve somehow made at least six records that are really good, if not great, while strolling across that tightrope.
I actually haven’t spent enough time with their latest, Sympathy for Life, to offer any significant thoughts beyond, “Yeah, it’s pretty good, man.” There are a handful of songs that really stood out to me and a bunch of others that will surely reveal themselves to me over time, so I really need to go on some walks in the near future. Parquet Courts are walking music to me. I associate some of their albums with a time in my life where I’d walk up an annoyingly long hill to get to the shitty grocery store, another when I’d be hustling across the podium of my college campus to get to class, and most of their discography with the day-and-a-half I spent in NYC just about two years ago, in which I listened to their albums as I bopped between the boroughs on a frelance assignment — the most Parquet Courts way to listen to Parquet Courts.
If you’re already a fan of the band then you know what I’m talking about and I hope you nodded your head affirmatively at least once or twice while reading this blurb. But if you’re a Parquet Courts skeptic like my cohosts and many of my other friends, I persuade you to put on the song that’s literally called, “Walking at at a Downtown Pace,” from their new record and just listen to it while you’re walking….somewhere. The coffee shop, the post office, down the hall of the building you’re in right now. Let yourself get a little loosey goosey. Maybe put you left foot in and take your left foot out just to see what it feels like. It’s the band fully-realizing what they do best and writing an anthem for anxious, nervous-energy-producers-who-have-somewhere-to-be worldwide. I think it’s almost impossible not to like if you’re the type of person reading this newsletter right now. But if you don’t well, maybe you’re just not “boyfriend” enough.
Cloakroom - “Paperweight”
Michael Brooks:
Last Friday, we released part two of our series on Run For Cover Records, concluding a nearly four hour deep dive on that label's history. If you haven’t checked that out yet, I highly suggest that you do—at one point during the most recent episode I encourage people to email us and let us know what’s the best cancelled band that they saw in 2016, which I have absolutely no recollection of saying but I think is kind of funny that I did. You would think that after immersing myself into Run For Cover’s catalog for weeks and spending hours upon hours checking out their bands that I would maybe want to listen to something else, but now that colder weather is upon us and things are finally starting to feel like fall I can’t stop listening to Cloakroom.
As I mentioned on the podcast, Further Out was the first album that I really remember coming out on Run For Cover. I have a couple of friends from Indiana that I met through playing music and once they hit their mid-20s they all became obsessed with vintage guitars and boutique amps, so obviously Cloakroom was a band that they worshipped. My quality of life would be so much better if I owned a Gibson Grabber or a Janice 2x12 cab so I can definitely understand why this band and all of the awesome gear that they owned spoke to my friends (by the way if anybody reading this would like to sell me a Janice 2x12 cab get ahold of me at endlessscrollpod@gmail.com).
Part of the charm of a song like “Paperweight,” which opens Further Out, are those beautifully distorted tones but the reason I keep going back to it year after year is because it’s a fucking perfect pop song. Although you could easily label the band as shoegaze, emo, or slowcore it’s the way that they blend all three of those genres together that makes their music so invigorating. Further Out is the perfect soundtrack for a crisp Autumn day, put on some headphones and play “Paperweight” loud as fuck if you don’t believe me.