By Lucy Oster ’23
Staff Writer
The stage at Gateway City Arts in Holyoke was littered with instruments last Friday night as members of the crowd waited for American rock band Parquet Courts to perform.
Parquet Courts was the lead act of the night, following an energetic performance by the indie-rock band Public Practice. During their set, Public Practice played several songs from their debut full-length album, “Gentle Grip.” Parquet Courts, accompanied by Public Practice, are on tour to promote their recently released seventh album, “Sympathy for Life,” which came out on Oct. 22.
Though both bands are based in New York City, Parquet Courts has a history with Massachusetts, as bassist Sean Yeaton is from the state. While on stage, he joked about visiting Herrell’s, a well-beloved ice cream store in Northampton. Though it would be easy to attribute the sold-out venue to the band’s regional connection, the music and the thrill of live performance was more than enough to carry the show.
“We are conductors of sound, heat and energy,” the band sings on the opening track of their 2018 album, “Wide Awake!” The performance on Friday only proved that point. The music was loud and made for an exciting show, with members of the crowd even moving up to the stage to mosh multiple times. At one point, a concert-goer briefly crowd-surfed.
The show’s setlist was dominated with tracks from “Sympathy for Life,” the band’s most recent album. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Andrew Brown, one of Parquet Courts’ two frontmen, discussed the musical influence behind the album. “I got really into dance music and realized in those environments, the music is the thing that connects everybody … That was massively inspiring,” Brown said. This dance music influence is evident in the song “Application/Apparatus,” in which a disco-esque beat gradually gets louder and louder.
The music seemed to energize the audience at Gateway City Arts, but members of the crowd grew noticeably more excited when the band played songs from “Wide Awake,” such as the joyful rock “Freebird II.” Perhaps some audience members were just more familiar with songs from the previous album than the album that came out less than a month ago.
Karen Muller, a concert attendee who has written about music for the Boston Globe and WBUR, revealed that she loved “Sympathy for Life” and had listened to it a “few times already” that night.
A lyrical motif within “Sympathy for Life” is a vase of flowers, which is pictured on the album cover. To reflect this motif, there were two vases of flowers on the crowded stage behind lead vocalist Andrew Savage. When the band performed their new song, the lyrically minimalist “Plant Life,” Savage grabbed some of the flowers and threw them into the crowd. The flowers were visible in the crowd for the rest of the show, some audience members triumphantly holding them up as they danced.
“Sympathy for Life” was largely written and recorded before the pandemic, but seems custom-made for a post-lockdown world, as it emphasizes dance, music and community. On “Zoom Out,” a song about putting life and its daily problems into perspective, the band sings about appreciating the smaller things in life: “We got dancing / We got screaming / We got laughin’ / And we got feelin.’”
During the show, the band bantered between playing songs, with Yeaton even joking about buying Gateway City Arts. The energy was high and very positive. Just as Parquet Courts intended, the concert did indeed have dancing, laughing and feeling. Savage seemed to appreciate the crowd’s participation, saying, “Thanks for moving your bodies, these songs were specifically designed for it.”