For obvious reasons, “Wide Awake!” has pretty much been my daily wakeup song ever since Parquet Courts dropped the single off their forthcoming album of the same name. Not to be confused with the Katy Perry song of the same name, it’s a funky, Minutemen/Clash-esque jam that kicks your ass out of bed and gets you “movin’ and groovin’ and I ain’t ever losin’ the pace,” as the song’s posi-vibes chant goes. Other singles off the album– including the more recent “Mardi Gras Beads,” a mellow number evoking Pavement’s “Shady Lane”– are pretty great, too. But then what else would you expect from the Brooklyn band that produced the universally admired 2016 album Human Performance?
Pitchfork bestowed an 8.4 on that album and noted its distinct NYC-ness: “Human Performance captures the humor and horror of New York in 2016, alive with post-Cagean street noise, with a faster-louder Ramonic ideal, with the erratic rhythm of train delays, a bus that never shows up, or the ‘skull-shaking cadence of the J train rolls.'” Makes sense, then, that the May 17 installment of Pitchfork Live will find Parquet Courts performing at Rough Trade NYC, the New York outpost of their record label, Rough Trade Records. If you don’t want to settle for listening live via Pitchfork’s homepage and you can break away from work for the noon show, you can snag tickets by buying the new album from Rough Trade– which, let’s face it, you were going to do anyway. Wide Awake! is available as an LP ($22.99), CD ($14.99), or bonus LP ($29.99), the last of which features a 16-page booklet of illustrations by singer-songwriter-guitarist Andrew Savage, who did the cover art.
For more about the album– which apparently incorporates a choir of classically trained 12-year-olds– and to buy tickets, head over to Rough Trade NYC.