For a snapshot of how much white indie fans of the ’90s could project onto Pavement, and, more specifically, onto Stephen Malkmus, we start with a 1999 piece on Terror Twilight I’m suitably ambivalent about. The few quotes were all I could salvage from an interview I flubbed so badly because I was more interested in imagining the persona than talking to the man.
In addition to the sheer number of pieces (eight, including some show previews, and likely more than I’ve published about anyone) there were other surprises waiting for me in the archives. (I wrote about Face the Music twice?) But mostly the ideas here felt familiar, as I spent a couple decades circling around this music, never quite saying exactly how I felt about a band who never quite said exactly what they’d meant.
When you’re done with this week’s post, please check out this this review of last September’s Pavement show in St. Paul for Racket, which offers up the good stuff. (I’m not reprinting it here—we need the clicks and subscription dough.) Of course, if you’d like to skip the overture and learn where all these notes lead, you can head right over to the Racket story now. But don’t you want to read about how I caught Malkmus lying about his age?
Pained & Disdained: Pavement’s Terror Twilight
City Pages, June 2, 1999
Pavement had the immense mixed fortune of emerging as a cult band at a time when every other guitar-based cult band on the books seemed to be holding mass initiation rites. Their 1992 debut on Matador, Slanted & Enchanted, serendipitously compiled a sort of Cliffs Notes version of the lo-fi canon for indie rock's alternative fellow travelers, just as a nation of former college radio DJs launched rosy-lensed careers as high-minded promo shills or alt-boosting journalists. At such a heady moment, who could blame confused souls for circulating an urban myth that would become a sort of '90s “Paul is dead” among supposedly media-savvy Sub Populists: “Pavement are the next big thing”?
And yet Pavement's flirtation with their fawning fans remained willfully aloof, as they pretended to court a phantasmic mass audience with whom they shared little more than a mutual ignorance of one another. By 1994's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Malkmus was muttering the cryptic text of a Let's Go! Bohemia with such an even mix of awkwardness and assurance that it seemed positively gauche to ask what it all meant. The band, meanwhile, sculpted its mistuned psychedelia into a grand, sad, goofy approximation of the natural world. In other words, Pavement had made themselves over as an R.E.M. that never signed to Warner Bros. And now, for every noise-pop die-hard who still considers their second album (if not their first) a sellout, there are dozens of fans who still haven't forgiven Malkmus for not wanting to become Michael Stipe.
Add those numbers up, however, and you'll still find yourself many consumers short of a gold record. Not that Malkmus, who graduated from the University of Virginia-Charlottesville with a history degree, is particularly adept at such calculations. Over the phone from England, he not only insists that he never expected mass success for his band but claims to be 30 years old—this only five minutes after saying that he received his B.A. in 1988. I dutifully point out that this would make our Stephen a precocious 19 when he left college—hardly Doogie Howser stats, but prodigious nonetheless. “Actually, I'm a little older than 30,” he confesses. “I'm in my 30s. I guess I'm already doing that Hollywood thing, lying about my age, like Courtney Love or something.” Malkmus issues all this in the same unruffled California drawl with which he tosses off a flip reference to Spin's lukewarm six-out-of-ten rating for the new album, Terror Twilight, or fends off accusations that his band's cultural moment has passed. What? Him worry?
Maybe so. When “Spit on a Stranger” becomes the latest Pavement single not to climb the charts this summer, while the CD it calls home remains firmly ensconced on display shelves nationwide, that drawl will again be the voice you never hear on the radio-oh. Will it matter that the guitars chime with the same delicately arpeggiated empathy that once assured us that “Everybody Hurts” and now assures us that everybody loves—complete with the elegant bachelor ambivalently croaking his troth? Will it matter that the line “Honey, I'm a prize, and you're a catch, and we're a perfect match” is as tenderly post-ironic an indecent proposal as you could imagine? Or that Malkmus has become the greatest non-singer of his generation, his flat mewl the distillation of a mutant strain of melancholy that draws equally from Jonathan Richman's tender quaver, Lou Reed's flattened affect, and David Lowery's valley-boy smirk? This voice, collegiate yet never collegial, has an undeserved resonance with the band's coterie of fans: Perhaps it even signifies, for some, an erudite Caucasian authenticity.
Granted, love as a mutual contempt for the outside world isn't the sort of sentiment most folks would care to dance to—nor is expectorating your affection for your partner on passersby. But that delicate balance of sensitivity and disdain has always been the lynchpin of Pavement's sensibility. Malkmus has always sparingly allocated his empathy for a “you” that's highly selective if not singular. And fans, happy masochists that we are, continue to listen, imagining that we might just number among his second person plural. Secretly, we fret that when Malkmus murmurs, “Don't waste your precious breath/Explaining that you are worthwhile,” he's not looking at us but glancing over our shoulder at someone whose record collection, reading list, or personal aura is just a teensy bit hipper than ours.
Still, it's worth noting that the plucky wah-wah bounce of '...and Carrot Rope,' from which that last lyric is excerpted, closes out Terror Twilight with a surreal optimism that's as far from the despondent elegies of mid-period Pavement as that stuff was from their 1989 hiss-track pop. Compare the singer's new glee to the solipsistic sigh with which he placed a loner's want ad for a “prison architect” on 1997's Brighten the Corners, a concept album about his peevish reluctance to assume his rightful place in the upper middle class. (Not out of any incipient bolshevism, mind you—just simple petulance.) By contrast, Terror Twilight sprawls out in the liberty that affluence affords.
But it's a long, strange trip nonetheless, and the album's overarching tone can still descend into a moody rumble. Like a gaggle of old hippies jamming—hell, at times like the Grateful Dead themselves—Pavement often threaten to ramble on with a complacency that comes when you've freed yourself from the expectations of others. And yet they never quite do. Though the guitars glance off half-acknowledged melodies, an invisible hand of impeccable taste reins them in with a dynamic shift just when the band threatens to veer into its own navel. Hardly HORDE-ready good-time boogie, this, but it's still more musically limber—and ideologically sensible—than the intricate technophobia of Radiohead's OK Computer, with which Terror Twilight shares producer Nigel Godrich.
In retrospect, Pavement's mid-'90s gestures toward accessibility seem like acts of noblesse oblige more than career moves. Just as a page poet self-consciously employs the formal constraints of an outmoded rhyme scheme, the band had the good sense to exploit pop's constrictions rather than noodle into free-form oblivion while Malkmus performed his spoken-word poetry. True, the group shrewdly hedged its bets between selling itself and selling itself short, and those who prefer their cult band of choice to engage in the drama of cultural insurgency (or at least to have some subcultural relevance) have every right to excuse themselves from the Pavement bookmobile.
But now it's 1999, and Nirvana's crusade to demonstrate that you don't have to wear leather pants to sing pop-metal on MTV has proven so successful that the Goo Goo Dolls are now free to wear leather pants and sing pop-metal on MTV. In the end, perhaps Pavement's hermetically sealed simulacrum of a career took a wiser route than punk revolutionaries or pop democrats would care to admit.
Critic’s Pick: Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
Chicago Reader, May 22, 2003
The cleverest thing about Stephen Malkmus’s 2001 solo debut, a set of 12 dutifully crafted indie-rock exercises, was its title: Stephen Malkmus. Only a real smart-ass would name his least personal work after himself. Prior to that, with each succeeding Pavement album, Malkmus’s lyrics had drifted closer to expressing thoughts and feelings that might actually have been some facsimile of the singer’s own. Solo, however, he all but discarded his preferred mode, the allusive reverie, in favor of the carefully observed short story. What’s more, songs like “Jo Jo’s Jacket,” in which Malkmus assumed the voice of Yul Brynner to reminisce about the actor’s career, seemed deliberately and even defiantly slight. Yet his deadpan vocals invested these trivialities with unexpected shades of emotion–just as, with Pavement, he’d recontextualized offhand comments by singing them as though they were his deepest confessions (and vice versa). Words sure aren’t the point on his new Pig Lib (Matador): “Craw Song,” the tale of a never-to-be threesome, might have sounded at home on Stephen Malkmus, but on the nine-minute “1% of One” the singer is soon distracted from the plot by his guitar, which rambles down its own shady Verlaine. Malkmus’s new band, the Jicks, get full billing here, and they deserve it–it must take a lot of practice to disguise such intricate guitar interplay as absentminded noodling. And while I still don’t agree with the folks who say that Pavement could have used a tighter rhythm section, now I know where they’re coming from.
Critic’s Pick: Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
Chicago Reader, June 9, 2005
Face the Truth (Matador), Stephen Malkmus’s third solo album, is as pleasurable–and perplexing–as its predecessors. All tossed-off novelty narratives and chattering guitars, Stephen Malkmus (2001), his first post-Pavement release, sometimes sounded too easy. The follow-up, Pig Lib (2003), could sound too hard—guitars got tangled in proggy knots and words were willfully opaque. But true believers expecting the new disc to be juuuust right will be spooning their way through a whole ‘nother bowl of porridge. Malkmus still seems strangely absent as a vocalist, as if he’s trying to prove that a singer-songwriter needn’t have a persona. And as a guitarist, he’s still chasing arty intricacy, attempting to devise tunes as self-contained, difficult, and sui generis as the lo-fi scraps of genius that preceded Slanted & Enchanted. Luckily, the guy’s got an expressive streak. Even at his most verbally abstract he sounds like he has something to say, and sometimes his tightly coiled compositions unroll gracefully into moments of uncommon beauty, as on “Freeze the Saints” with its seductive plea, “Help me languish here.”
Repaved: Silver Jews, indie jazzmen, solo Malkmus, and the Pavement legacy
City Pages, October 12, 2005
What if the essential truths of the human condition really are as simple as three million Mitch Albom readers believe? Well, for starters, art as we know it sure is fucked. The quest to illuminate neglected crannies of interpretation would be debunked as a sheisty means to obscure the obvious. That Abercrombie dude in your freshman lit class who accused your professor of ferreting out “hidden meanings”? Vindicated. And history would be rewritten by the nitwits who dismissed Pavement as slipshod collegiate snobs.
Even fans are often suspicious of Stephen Malkmus and his crew. “You never really knew where Pavement stood on anything,” wrote Pitchfork's Mark Richardson last year in a perceptive review of Matador's two-disc Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain reissue. But, really, we had our suspicions: Melodies loitered in the spaces guitar atonalities neglected to shade in, and Malkmus littered countless implications in the gaps between literal lyrical sense and his WASPish end run around vocal affect. If ever musicians sidled crabwise toward meaning, these elliptical souls were they. But what fate faces purposeful indirection in an age of bunkered sensibilities, where both the Allied Vice-Gawker snark contingent and the Axis of Emo claim they're the final bulwark against the other's excesses? Fittingly enough, three recent Pavement-related discs stylishly refuse to answer that question.
We might suspect that when Stephen Malkmus calls an album Face the Truth he is, as we used to say in the '90s, “being ironic.” Which is never the same as being sarcastic, but simply acknowledges that the closer you come to saying exactly what you feel, the less likely you are to say exactly what you mean. Still, note the past tense when he tells himself, “Somehow you managed to elucidate something that was on all of their minds,” on “Pencil Rot.” The pleasures of Face the Truth—both its language tangles and proggy guitar curlicues—are small and private. Malkmus played just about everything here, and as a one-man muddle of talent and craft who excels at simulating meanings he refuses to confirm, he certainly shows up a contented hobbyist like Paul McCartney. At times, though, it's like watching someone complete a crossword puzzle without being allowed to suggest answers.
David Berman has been through too much recently to risk going it alone. The Silver Jews' Tanglewood Numbers is an old-time indie rock hootenanny whose gaggle of noteworthies includes Malkmus and fellow Pavementeer Bob Nastovich, with whom Berman formed the Silver Jews in 1989. A familiar instrumental overemphasis on the third beat of the 4/4 lends “Farmer's Motel,” the sole Malkmus co-credit here, a Pavement-like stagger. Yet most of this disc's guitar work, not all of it Malkmus's, is understated, jangling just out of tune or hovering near a forthright melody. And though, like his sometime mate, Berman often pins down allusive lyrics through vocal emphasis, requests like “Baby woncha take this magnet and put my picture back on your fridge,” from “I'm Getting Back into Getting Back into You” are pretty concrete already. This is indie obliqueness as ingrained routine, a daily off-center practice rather than a restless pilgrimage.
Herculean saxman James Carter and wily pianist Cyrus Chestnut are more matter-of-fact yet. But they don't simply jazzify the eight Pavement tunes on Gold Sounds--they locate the wobbling relationship to atonality at the core of each song. Carter loosely rolls the verse of “Stereo” around the bell of his horn like a marble, then spits out the chorus staccato. Chestnut rags the intro of “Trigger Cut” into Monk manqué, then glides through verse and chorus, scattering blue notes in his wake. And when drummer Ali Jackson smacks Carter to improvisatory heights on “My First Mine” or Reginald Veal's galloping bass is buffeted on either side by Carter's percussive pops and Jackson's tambourine on “Summer Babe,” there's a sense of play Malkmus is too uptight and Berman too casual to fully indulge. It's a reminder that there are still plenty of ways to brighten the corners Pavement eventually painted themselves into—and that simple truths are just boring.
“The fucking ’90s were cool. Hummus was exotic.”: Pavement at the Roy Wilkins Auditorium
AV Club Minneapolis, Sept. 13, 2010
Let’s can the “slacker” talk already, always a lazy way to typecast Stephen Malkmus’s pitch-evasive Valley-boy drawl, drummer Steve West’s distracted shambling, and Pavement’s guitar mis-tunings, which are now as integral to the rock vernacular as distortion itself. Pavement whisked through twenty-eight songs in just under two hours last night at the dreaded Roy Wilkins Auditorium, starting with “Cut Your Hair” (which we all pretended was a hit) and stopping with “Here” (which we all pretended could have been one), not a single rendition perfunctory. You know, like a real rock and roll reunion show (complete with overpriced tickets and overbearing light show) but with a few false starts, for old times sake, just so you didn’t think you were at a Foo Fighters concert or something.
While you’re at it, leave “irony,” “lo-fi,” and “Gen X” in your I Love the ’90s time capsule too. Hang on to “self-aware,” though, because if any reunion of the definitive indie-rock band of its era (and the best without girls in it) was destined to dredge up nostalgia, Pavement would for damn sure express their self-conscious perspective on that. Their time had passed, and lyrics like “I’ve got style/ Miles and miles/ So much style that it’s wasted” and “Stone Temple Pilots are elegant bachelors” weirdly evoked not our youth, as nostalgia typically does, but a historical moment marked by a vastly different sensibility. Or, as Malkmus put it (during a ramble about the band’s backstage spread, the specifics of which need not concern us): “The fucking ’90s were cool. Hummus was exotic.”
The five members roamed onstage, casual in t-shirts and jeans or khakis, promising “the last time you’ll ever see us” (unless you wanted to road trip to Milwaukee tomorrow night, that is). Guitarist Scott Kannberg got to sing a couple of his tunes. Bassist Mark Ibold was reassuringly amicable and low-key. Malkmus was wry and aloof. Auxiliary noisemaker Bob Nastanovich provided stage presence, contributing shouty vocal bits, beat on a second drum kit or shook his tambourine or noodled about with keyboard effects, and jumped around like a make-believe rock star. In between songs, he talked sports and Des Moines, and he traipsed across stage with a lucky audience member during “We Danced.”
Their set was heavily weighted toward the first half of their career, with eight songs from Slanted & Enchanted (“Two States”! “Perfume V”!) and seven from Crooked Rain Crooked Rain (“Gold Soundz”! “Range Life”!) plus a handful from their EP/7-inch days (“Box Elder”! “Frontwards”!) If you liked any of the songs, you probably liked ’em all. There were definitely worse ways of avoiding the VMAs.
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks Both Mock And Slyly Embody Middle Age On Wig Out At Jagbags
Spin, January 20, 2014
You can maybe stay cool into your forties, but don’t bet on it. The hippest in-jokes wither into the limpest dad jokes, and the culprit’s nothing as banal as fluctuation in fashion or the inevitability of losing touch with current trends— it’s middle-age itself, the most superficial and least surprising of all life’s way stations, a slough devoid of all magic and mystery. A kid’s delusions of immortality give offhand utterances an air of discovery; a geezer’s croak hints at mortality and seems vaguely oracular. In between, you just try to have a little fun without embarrassing yourself too much.
At 47, Stephen Malkmus is gunning for the title of Least Embarrassing Rock Dude of His Generation. His personal life is a model of mature bohemian security: WASPy good looks intact, recently returned to Portland after a couple years in Berlin, married (with two children) to an established visual artist, with indie rock still providing a steady job—maybe even a (sing along, all you ’90s kids) a car-ee-ah, car-ee-ah, car-ee-ah. Nor has his gift for getting away with shit waned. The title of his sixth album since Pavement’s breakup slammed the door on the ’90s, and Wig Out at Jagbags (that’s Go Mental at Wankers, for our U.K. readers) should make you wince, but instead comes off as mildly brilliant. The guy is, in short, pretty cool. For a 47-year-old.
Like its predecessors, Jagbags feels casual in a way that Malkmus’s old band, for all the slacker clichés lobbed lazily their way, were too young and too committed to finding their place in the world to risk. The chief pleasures are often seemingly minor details that nose their way into the foreground: the extended doo-doo’ing chorus of “Houston Hades,” the distorted bass on “Shibboleth,” a muted trumpet on “J Smoov.” (Also generally pleasurable: the song titles.)
Meanwhile, Malkmus’s guitar retains an innate ability to careen into tunefulness as though inadvertently; here, it draws upon the most classic of rock. On “Planetary Motion,” he threatens to learn the riff to Cream’s “I Feel Free” over a rhythmically precise herky-jerk that would give Ginger Baker fits. “The Janitor Revealed” meanders into the odd Hendrix flourish or two, while “Chartjunk” is a ramshackle boogie that stumbles across perky ELO choruses. But retro-fueled as the playing may be, it’s not nostalgic, or even, as often was the case with Pavement, elegiac—it’s pragmatic, seeking to adapt and extend musical resources our host has lived with too long to be called mere influences.
Lyrics are a trickier matter, where the Pavement legacy looms largest. Malkmus once crafted a language by which an inherently diffident (or ironic) (or aloof) (or distant) (or, you know, whatever) tribe learned to miscommunicate with one another, dropping clues to the heart’s cryptic crossword puzzle and trusting that the like-minded would have enough time on their hands to bother deciphering them: “All the sterile striking it / Defends an empty dock you cast away” (from Slanted and Enchanted‘s “Here”). His vocal command remains intact, that wry surety of tone still justifying his vagaries of pitch, always sounding smarter than its most nonsensical turns (without condescending) and warmer than its snottiest bits (without sentimentalizing). But if you’re scratching your head over John Ashbery Mad-Libs like “Livin’ in this yurt / Everybody hurts / There’s no central heat,” well, two guesses who the joke’s on.
And yet, puzzling over hidden meanings is an all-but-unkickable habit, especially when Malkmus glances self-consciously backward. “Come and join us in this punk rock tomb,” he beckons at the start of “Rumble at the Rainbo,” an uncomfortably on-the-nose battle cry for rock’n’roll lifers, its punchline a half-assed postpunk skank breakdown. When he attempts to provide those lifers with a motto—“No one here has changed and no one ever will”—does he mock them, dismiss them, include himself in their number? Yeah, probably.
The less defensively historical “Lariat” is a turn-of-the-’90s reminiscence that catalogs post-collegiate experience through the music, books, and meals consumed together. Mudhoney, the Sun City Girls, and Bongwater all appear, not to mention “Tennyson / And venison / And the Grateful Dead.” Pa Malkmus even throws some good-natured shade at you kids (“We grew up listening to the music from the best decade ever / Talkin’ ’bout the A-D-Ds”) and maybe even your fashion sense (“People look great when they shave”). You want an unhidden meaning? Try “You’re not what you aren’t / You aren’t what you’re not.” (Sometimes un pipe est un pipe, eh M. Magritte?) Or “You got what you want / You want what you got.” The contentment Malkmus expresses here is so cozy you might feel a little corny calling it wisdom. But you wouldn’t embarrass yourself too much if you called it perspective.
Stephen Malkmus and Parquet Courts explore indie-rock freedom in an age of decreased opportunity: Sparkle Hard and Wide Awake!
City Pages, May 30, 2018
Stephen Malkmus has written a political song.
You might even call it a protest song. Yes, the same Stephen Malkmus who was once in Pavement. No, it's not very good.
"Bike Lane" appears to conflate gentrification and the murder of Freddie Gray. The former Pavement frontman chirps "another beautiful bike lane" in the chorus, then, with no greater vocal gravitas, relates the circumstances surrounding Gray's death at the hands of Baltimore police in the verses. The intentions are good (aren't they always?), but the irony feels cheap, somehow unfair not just to Gray but to two-wheeled yuppies. There's plenty to say about the use of police violence to erase people of color by any means necessary from an urban landscape that's been reconfigured for the comfort of a largely white middle class. But exhorting "Go, Freddie, go," as though the victim were some folkloric hero like Johnny B. Goode or Stagger Lee, fails to extract mythic heroism from actual tragedy.
It's unsettling to hear a master songwriter attempt to adapt his gifts to the necessities of the cultural moment only to prove his time-tested sensibility a mismatch for the endeavor. Fortunately, the bulk of Malkmus' new album, Sparkle Hard, is a rewarding push-and-pull between his style and the substance of the world around him. Set alongside Wide Awake!, the latest album from his spiritual descendants in the band Parquet Courts, it raises hope that contemporary indie rock can be smartly political—not by serving up slogans to shout in the street or analysis to be pondered, but by refracting our experiences through word and sound in a way that refines our emotional response to the blare that otherwise engulfs us.
Malkmus has now led his band the Jicks (whoever they happened to be at the moment) for about a half-decade longer than Pavement existed. Because the 51-year-old dad and husband is now a hobbyist exploring niches rather than a young visionary, each Jicks album has, in its own brilliantly idiosyncratic way, seemed quite unnecessary—and I mean that as the highest praise. So much great art arises in defiance of oppression, we're in danger of believing that suffering, either personal or collective, is needed to create. By contrast, so much of indie rock has been music born of privilege (as bohemian art often is), and its challenge is to not squander that privilege but to address a simple yet utopian question: What art would you make if you weren't driven by necessity?
But now it's 2018, and Malkmus sings, "There's no room left to do/Everything that you said you'd do." Throughout Sparkle Hard, reality limits what can be imagined, as current events surface like subconscious fears misshaping themselves into dreams. Malkmus' lyrics are as collagist as ever, but phrases as unremarkable "men are scum" or "you know you should be winning" on songs titled as simply as "Middle America" resonate far beyond their basic meanings, and statements like "Come from the underground/Throw me right back where I belong" feel like wishful thinking. When the lyric "I'm not looking for the kind of guy who'll turn my third place medal into gold" later turns into "I'll start looking...," it's like hearing a history of how 21st-century American megacapitalism has diminished our dreams, compressed into a single song.
Even in the '90s, Malkmus was rarely as inscrutable as plainspoken normies insisted—you couldn't always construct a plot from a Pavement lyric, but you could trace a train of thought, or at least limn a mood. Maybe you didn't want to put in the work, to distinguish between irony and sarcasm or earnestness and sincerity, but who's the slacker then? But he was free to set off with no direction in mind and discover a memorable path. Now, in an age of didacticism, his insistence on continuing to communicate in a way that's allusive without being evasive is its own modest political statement. What do we need? Secrets! When do we need 'em? Right now!
Four years ago, Malkmus famously mistook a Parquet Courts song playing in a coffee shop for Pavement, and considered the resemblance a compliment. But even in their scrappy early days, this quartet of Texan-bred New Yorkers sounded at most like a band who'd been influenced by the same bands as Pavement. They have more in common with the Minutemen—a comparison I'm hardly the first to make but that bears repeating as Wide Awake!‘s lyrics (for instance, "Nothing is normal/Manipulated into believing/I'm exercising skepticism/Honesty is everything") lean into the fractured syntax those '80s blue-collar funk-tinged punk revisionists favored.
Wide Awake! is also the band's sixth album in eight years, and don't forget those two substantial EPs and the live disc and the pair of oddball collaborations and did I mention singer A. Savage's solo disc? Slackers they ain't, partly because if you want to be the only youngish all-white-male guitar band really worth anyone's time in 2018 you've got to work extra hard, and also because New York ain't as cheap as it was back in the '90s when neoliberalism was still wasteful enough to leave a few pools of cash here and there for artsy underachievers to lap from. Thirty years ago, Malkmus supported himself by warning Whitney patrons not to step too close to the paintings; now, as the Courts once lamented, "There are no more summer lifeguard jobs/There are no more art museums to guard."
So yes, options are limited—economically, aesthetically, spiritually. But with Danger Mouse's production brightening the corners of their rant 'n' roil, Parquet Courts burrow forward with termite temerity regardless. The opening guitar crunch of "Total Football" sounds like Joan Jett adapting "The Internationale" for the World Cup, and fist-pumping chants of solidarity like "Better protected/Whenever collected" and "Power resembled/If we are assembled" ring out as though to say, sure, sports is great, but have you ever tried full communism? "Violence" addresses many of the issues "Bike Lane" attempts to, but with stark phrasing ("we cannot afford to close an open casket") and acid questioning ("What is an up-and-coming neighborhood and where is it coming from?")
Wide Awake! seems determined to prove that any genre can be "punk," that eclecticism is a political virtue because it proves that urgency and a sense of experimentation can coexist. Parquet Courts reach into dub and funk, the title track is a roller-skating jam as protest rally, and "Death Will Bring Change" is '60s pop-psychedelia with a children's chorus warbling in support. And the band clearly wants us all to join in. While I was doing the dishes the other night, I started singing the bounciest chorus here: "Well I can't count how many times I've been outdone by nihilism/Joined the march that splits an open heart into a schism." I still don't know exactly what it means. But I now know exactly how it feels to mean it.