Following on from their performance at this year’s Electric Picnic, scrimshanking Brooklynites Parquet Courts are back already for a sweatier gig in the more natural habitat of Whelans on 14th October. We caught up with Austin Brown from the group to get his take on the jump to bigger stages, brand synergy with tacos and their attempts to avoid the music promotion merry-go-round.
So this has been your first summer of big festival shows. How are you finding them in comparison to the smaller club gigs where Parquet Courts cut their teeth?
It’s interesting, totally different. You’re playing for people that maybe have heard of you or heard “this is a good rock band”. It’s been a while since we played for people that have never heard of us. At club shows, people know the record or have heard it on this or that but playing for a big audience is really refreshing. It’s cool to see people get won over towards the end of your set… or at least have them not leave!
It’s almost strange to encounter a four-piece rock band playing at a festival nowadays. It’s as if the majority of the line-ups now are made up of a big-name heritage act headliners or maybe Mumford and Sons, and the rest is primarily electronic acts.
It has taken a turn towards more electronic music, which I guess is kind of a new thing for music festivals considering their history and where they began. I guess what’s really surprising is seeing someone like Rihanna at a festival, that’s kind of lame. I feel like there could be some more discerning taste employed.
I’ve seen the word “slacker” thrown around relating to guys – probably the first time I’ve seen that word sincerely applied in about 20 years. There is a sense of disenfranchisement to your music, but no real apathy.
I’ve always been kind of miffed by that. It’s borderline insulting to call somebody a slacker who’s been working so hard. I’ve been on the road more than I’ve been at home this year and it’s kind of a bummer.
I keep seeing that picture of you guys eating tacos at the top of every interview and I’m convinced it’s an attempt to create a subconscious association between you guys and tacos. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t like tacos and if you could turn every taco fan into a Parquet Courts fan you’d be sitting pretty.
[Laughs] I forget why we did that, I think we had to have press photos that day for something and we were putting it off for a while. We had to play a show that day and asked our friend Heather to come and take a picture but we had to go get dinner so and that was the only picture that had all our faces in it.
Was there a point when it was decided that you guys didn’t want to go down certain avenues of promotion?
I think we’ve all been in bands forever and have watched plenty of buzz bands rise and fall to the same fate, so when we started playing and releasing music we began thinking about those things. We started to think more about how people first get exposed to us and we wanted to make sure people have a good experience with our music. We thought about how we first came to find our favourite bands. I couldn’t tell you which bands I listen to now that I read about on a music website. It’s bands I either went to see playing with another band I liked or who were recommended from a friend – a word-of-mouth thing where people are hearing your music from someone they trust as opposed to a music journalist.
When were recorded our first cassette, we just mailed them out to people that we knew around the country from touring or friends of friends or people that work at record stores. They heard it because they knew us personally and those people recommended it to their friends so by the time Light Up Gold came out we had people already interested in us because they had heard about us from people they trusted. And that value and that procedure continued on until now where we turn down a lot of promo opportunities with different websites because I don’t want people to hear our music for the first time and it’s us doing an acoustic version of one of our songs. Or I don’t want to play on whatever TV station because I don’t think that they recommend good music and I don’t want to be associated with that. All of those are important things to consider and I think it worked out well for us for the most part. Hopefully other bands starting will recognize you can make your own path if that’s what you choose.
It’s refreshing as a music fan to see a band with some semblance of values. It seems that you put a lot of thought into lyrics “designed” to be heard.
When we were mixing the record we talked about what we liked about our favourite records: good lyrics, a good track order, it flows together and you can listen to it start to finish. I think we got lucky with how it came together because it happened so quickly. It sucks to hear a band that has a killer riff but the lyrics are almost embarrassing. It’s a matter of spending some extra time thinking about what you’re making rather than being like “I’m in a rock band, this is a rock song. Oh shit I need to put some words on top of it because that’s what a rock song sounds like.”
There is a lot of humour in your lyrics and it’s by no means po-faced and far from preachy but aiming to do something worthwhile. That’s admirable nowadays when you compare your record to the lyrics on the latest Wavves record or something like that.
I’m glad you can distinguish the difference between us and Wavves! We were somewhere in Canada and some drunk asshole kept saying to us that we were the “east coast Wavves.” And I was just like “Oh my god, you clearly don’t get it just go away!”[Laughs] It was terrible! It was almost frustrating asking ourselves what did we do wrong.
With a lot of other bands with two front men, Pavement would be the first I think of, there is a very obvious difference between a Malkmus song and a Spiral Stairs song where that’s not as pronounced with you guys. It seems there is a more unified vision as opposed to two simultaneous solo projects.
Yeah, I think that by the time Light Up Gold was recorded we’d been playing together for about a year and a half, practiced a lot and willfully developed a unified vision that you don’t really hear on American Specialties. If you pull out a couple of songs from Light Up Gold, say Picture Of Health and Yr No Stoner, those two tracks maybe don’t fit with each other directly but if you listen to the record start to finish you can see how we got from one point to the other.
Parquet Courts play Whelans on October 14th, tickets are €16.50 from WAV
