Parquet Courts finished up its winter tour with a raucous, fast and politically charged performance at the 9:30 Club on Monday night, playing many of the songs off its latest album “Human Performance.”
Starting right at 9:30 p.m. following opener Mary Lattimore, the band launched into some of the hits from its most recent album, including “Dust” and “Human Performance,” for an eager audience of diverse ages, backgrounds and genders. The crowd began moshing to the third song, “Outside,” and only stopped for the clearly genuine banter between the two guitarists and co-vocalists, Adam Savage and Austin Brown, and some of the well-paced slower songs.
Parquet Courts is uniquely positioned due to the fact that not only does it have two singers, but also a variety of melodies, speeds and influences that the band is able to call upon to keep the audience engaged for the nearly 90 minute set.
The absence of a visual backdrop or intricate light set-up allowed the band’s art-punk, garage rock and indie rock sounds to speak for themselves, loud and untamed.
The intensity of the 20-somethings in the crowd, including several from the AU community, at times quite literally shook the stage. The distorted, calculated guitar-rock chaos awoke what could have been a sleepy Monday night crowd just two songs into the set, which allowed the band to directly feed off the energy — and to put it right back out into the audience.
At any given moment it was easy to get lost in bassist Sean Yeaton’s headbanging and Savage’s pure punk vocal delivery, or to watch Savage’s brother, Max, pound rhythmically on his drums, utterly stoic in his trance.
Now on its fifth album, the band has no shortage of stellar tracks to pull into its 20-song setlist. Parquet Courts has cultivated a serious following, one that sweated and swayed on Monday as much as the quartet they came to see.
