Content Nausea is PARQUET COURTS’ second album of 2014. Credited to the group’s alter ego, Parkay Quarts, the album is mostly the work of members Andrew Savage and Austin Brown along with some instrumental assists from Jackie-O Motherfucker’s Jef Brown on saxophone and Eaters’ Bob Jones on fiddle.
It’s a record filled with anxieties and trashed-sounding experiments. There’s even a wild cover of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s go-go girl classic “These Boots” thrown in for the hell of it, all committed to a 4-track cassette recorded over the span of two weeks. The album seems to be a reaction to the groups’ recent success and also the shifting interpersonal dynamics within the group (as the other members of the band get college degrees, start families, etc).
The album starts on a restless note with “Everyday It Starts,” with its repetitious interlocking grooves and scratchy, lo-fi guitar lines. The self-titled track “Content Nausea” is a frantic mediation on the information age; it ends up sounding like a cross between the Velvet Underground’s “The Murder Mystery” and a Spiral Stairs-penned Pavement song with a side order of some bad drugs. Elsewhere, “Slide Machine” hedges into classic D.C. Berman territory and “Pretty Machines” sounds like one of those indie rock guitar rave ups that you wish your band had the chops to pull off. Album closer “Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth” shows some darker esoteric psychedelic country-rock moves. Content Nausea definitely shows some different sides of the group along with some influences that have been previously unaired before. It’s obvious that times are changing both for the group and for the city that they now call home (which is depicted bleakly on the cover of the album drowning in information). In order to cope, it sounded like the guys called some friends over, fired up the 4-track and channeled those sneaky feelings into something restless, raw and new. We’re all the better for it.
Genre/ Tags: Alt-Country, Garage Rock, Alternative
Content Nausea LP: Tracklist:
1.) Everyday it Starts
2.) Content Nausea
3.) Urban Ease
4.) Slide Machine
5.) Kevlar Walls
6.) Pretty Machines
7.) Psycho Structures
8.) The Map
9.) These Boots
10.) Insufferable
11.) No Concept
12.) Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth
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Parquet Courts – Official Website
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