Split Tooth Media’s Pick of the Day is a new series in which we highlight under-appreciated, overlooked or oddball music, movies, games or whatever works we feel are important and worth sharing about. Feel free to share your picks with us in a comment below.
An industrial noise-rock EP about monastic silence shouldn’t work, right? For most people, it didn’t. But Parquet Courts’ Monastic Living EP is deserving of more than being brushed off as a “passionate shrug” by nearly everyone who listened to it once and forgot about it — myself included.
The public perception of Parquet Courts’ discography is baffling. The band’s full-length albums receive near-universal praise, but their other stray recordings are forgotten almost as soon as they’re released. Between the acclaimed Sunbathing Animal and Human Performance, the band released Content Nausea (as Parkay Quarts, with just singers/guitarists Andrew Savage and Austin Brown from the regular lineup) and the Monastic Living EP. Content Nausea, the band’s most ideologically complete album, quietly slipped under the radar with a mid-December release during best-of-the-year season. Then came the group’s strangest recording, the mostly instrumental Monastic Living.
In response to being named the last great New York band, rock’s coolest young band and being called stoner poets and slackers by critics more times than Kanye says “Kanye” in “I Love Kanye,” the band did its best to tame the hype. Andrew Savage’s lyrical salvo in “No No No” — the only song on the EP with words — is as much of a pounding statement as the destructive guitar screeches that follow. Savage sings, “I don’t want to be called a poet / I don’t want to be hanged in a museum / I don’t want to be tacked onto your cause / NO NO NO! I’m just a man.” He says he doesn’t want to be an essayist, an influence or even understood. So the best course forward is to just let the music do the talking.
“No No No” and “Alms For The poor” hint at Parquet Courts’ typical sound but, combined, the two tracks are only two minutes and seven seconds long. They’re little Easter eggs tossed in to let listeners know this is still the same band they came for. The rest veers off course in an experimental stroll through feedback, garbled synths and precise rhythms.
“Monastic Living I” is a meandering jam in 11/4 time. Sean Yeaton’s fuzz bass leads with a plodding three note theme that allows the guitars to freely double or disassemble the riff. Running at six and a half minutes, the song carries a brash sense of freedom that even jams like “One Man No City” can’t contain. At first you can’t tell whether to laugh or skip the song that seems derived from a world where The Shaggs reign supreme over The Beatles. But as it unfurls, the seemingly primitive song grows deceptively nuanced.
The harsh cuts between “Monastic Living I,” “Elegy of Colonial Suffering” and “Frog Pond Plop” pound like an unforgiving factory assembly line. Musically (though some may scoff at that distinction), this is where The Stooges meet Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music — an industrial environment overrun by feedback. Much like on The Beatles’ White Album, when “Long, Long, Long” whispers in after “Helter Skelter,” the transition between the metallic ringing of “Frog Pond Plop” into the hushed intro of “Vow of Silence” feels like being struck by daylight after exiting a theater. From there, the EP morphs into a more laidback outing. It loses a little momentum from its free-for-all first four tracks, but it never loses its anything goes (so long as you don’t sing) mentality.
Monastic Living is not a people-pleaser. But the key to this EP might be what’s printed after the lyrics to “No No No” on the LP sleeve: “Or perhaps silence is purity of spirit?” By releasing the most head-scratching collection of their career, Parquet Courts proved that they aren’t afraid to chase their artistic urges in the face of growing expectations. For them to say next to nothing so soon after the brilliant anti-internet lyrical outpouring of “Content Nausea” feels like a venture to the Stone Age — a period I have to imagine Andrew Savage might fit into perfectly. Sure, the group’s other material may be objectively better, but Monastic Living is worth a listen if only to witness the giant middle finger they flipped to the industry.
Follow Craig on Twitter
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
