Album Review: Wide Awake!, PARQUET COURTS

Just when everything else – from your mate’s bedroom laptop recording to your favourite alternative act’s latest album – sounds manufactured for radio play, along come Brooklyn alt.rock crew Parquet Courts to rectify the situation. Wide Awake! has all the ingredients of a vital piece of independent post-punk, at times recalling Husker Du, The Minutemen and The Replacements, yet spiked with a dose of Velvet Underground and a soupcon of Grace Jones to make things even more interesting. It’s fast, fierce, funky, and refreshingly unpolished. Serious credit is due to Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton’s lo-fi production, which is just the right side of raw. Perfectly mixing A. Savage and Austin Brown’s rough hewn vocals, spoken word diatribes, thundering guitars and retro psych-rock organ sounds, this is a hugely impressive addition to Burton’s already top-notch CV. Meanwhile, the album’s strand of late night disco evokes a feeling of sleazy decadence, harking back to the New York club landscape of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Sean Yeaton’s nimble basslines provide the driving force behind a lot of the tracks, particularly the likes of ‘Almost Had To Start Fighting...’ and ‘Freebird II’. Elsewhere ‘Back To Earth’ offers laidback spacey ambience, for a moment of chill, before the Bootsy Collins-esque bass jam of the eponymous title-track kicks in – and we’re back on the dancefloor getting down with our bad selves. The terrific final track, ‘Tenderness’, directly channels Warren Zevon with an addictive piano melody, which reminds you that Parquet Courts can effortlessly write smart pop nuggets when not revelling in all that fuzzy, frenzied rabble-rousing. Few acts can merge hardcore underground aesthetics with playful funk grooves, but Parquet Courts pull it off with aplomb. OUT NOW

Rating: 8/10