Parquet Courts Interview: Brooklyn Heights

The feline species is already haughty enough – to completely anthropomorphise things – without one of New York’s most highly-regarded indie acts basing a whole LP around their moggy. That’s what Parquet Courts have done, however, on the follow-up to 2012 breakthrough Light Up Gold. A less instant but ultimately more rewarding work than its predecessor, Sunbathing Animal finds creative guiding light Andrew Savage using his whiskered roommate Frida as a jumping-off point for an exploration on freedom and imprisonment.

With Frida also starring in the Replacements-like promo for the title track, you’ll forgive me for being a little starstruck when I speak to Savage from his Brooklyn abode.
“She’s around here somewhere…” offers Savage, a man who manages to sound truly nonchalant amidst a hipster sea of forced indifference. “Oh, there she is. She’s on the window. You know, the fame hasn’t gone to her head. She didn’t need it anyway; she’s already got quite the attitude.”
As Savage and his three cohorts prepare to take Sunbathing Animal to stages on this side of the Atlantic, the guitarist and singer assures me that the cat will be just fine. “I live with my best buddy Chris Pickering and we do the Dull Tools label together. So he holds down the fort here and feeds Frida.”
With animal welfare off our backs, talk turns to the new material. Lyrically, Savage has delved deeper this time out, bringing the vocals more to the surface to ensure no one misses their intent.
“I wanted to make a kind of literary rock record. Maybe not literary but something that had a lot of merit in the words. The lyrics were a lot more important to me than the music. As a result, a lot of the music is kind of repetitive and a bit static. That represents the confinement side of the duality; the rhythm section being very repetitive. The lead guitar parts represent the freedom side of it.
“There’s a lot of personal stuff in there,” he continues. “I’ve been imprisoned and I’ve had family members that are in jail so that’s one area that I was coming from. But I was also thinking of less literal types of imprisonment. Like spiritual or artistic imprisonment.”
Parquet Courts are a band that don’t like to be boxed in. Balking at “slacker” tags since ‘Stoned & Starving’ caught fire, they also want the world to know they’re no idiots. “I think sometimes people are surprised that we’re intelligent. We get that a lot: ‘Oh you guys are so much more thoughtful than I thought you would be.’”
People actually say that?
“Yeah. It’s like, maybe you should give people the benefit of the doubt!”
If the press throwing out supposed influences also rubs them the wrong way, Savage concedes that he was flattered when Stephen Malkmus said he once heard a Parquet Courts tune and momentarily mistook them for his own Pavement.
“They’re a great band. A legendary band. They’re not a huge influence on Parquet Courts, though. It’s more that both bands are into the Velvet Underground and Roxy Music. We come from the same line of influences but they’re not so much of a direct influence on us.”
One definite reference point for Sunbathing Animal was Arnold Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School and how they “created limitations on their composition”. In more rockist terms, they were inspired by the minimalist approach of German band Trio.
“They had a rule that you couldn’t do more than four tracks at a time. So most of their songs are drums, guitars, vocals and a synth or a saxophone. They had that hit ‘Da Da Da’, which we all know from the Volkswagen commercial, but they really were a great band beyond that song.”
At a time when most musicians are pragmatic about licensing their creations for commercial use, Parquet Courts take pride in retaining some old-fashioned NYC punk stubbornness and DIY principles.
“It’s a constant struggle and we have compromised,” Savage sighs. “But we did decide that we weren’t going to do ads, so at least we can sleep at night. That’s the one bit of integrity that we can hang on to!”
Savage has recently talked about his admiration for Constructivism, the manifesto-led, socially-driven artistic philosophy that bloomed in Russia after the communist revolution. What is the Parquet Courts manifesto?
“I actually tried to write one for us early on but the other guys thought it was kind of corny. So I guess we’re not really a manifesto band. I think if we have one manifesto it would be: don’t let anything become too precious. If you want to create something, do it and move on.”

Parquet Courts play Longitude on Friday July 18