New York Metropolis programs via Parquet Courts’ discography. The quartet that tapped the streets’ pulse on 2021’s “Strolling at a Downtown Tempo” has lengthy captured the complete spectrum of life within the metropolis, from heady exploration to sheer exhaustion. For a subset of listless transplants of a sure age—those that moved there lengthy after the Meet Me within the Lavatory years—Parquet Courts have been their home band. Now their frontman, A. Savage, finds the home in flames.
Savage has mentioned that A number of Songs About Fireplace is an album about escape—“a burning constructing.” It’s shot via with impending departures and monumental adjustments. Provided that the 37-year-old musician lastly decamped to Europe after finishing the report, it’s tempting to contemplate it his “Why I Left New York” essay. (“The cantos of my New York years/Are scribed in ink that disappears,” he purrs in “My My, My Pricey.”) By turns ruminative and jocular, he grapples with reminders that nothing is everlasting: rental conversions, altering seasons, useless buddies. But whereas all this would possibly recommend the brainy fury Savage constructed his identify on, his new album performs much less like an anxious lifeboat and extra like a meditative breadcrumb path from an previous life to a brand new one, vacation spot unknown.
Savage’s final solo report, 2017’s Thawing Daybreak, provided a ragged and infrequently twangy iteration of Parquet Courts’ ’70s rock fixations. A number of Songs About Fireplace is extra restrained; the acoustic songs and electrical rave-ups alike are easy and durable, anchored by his guitar and vocals and tastefully augmented by saxophones, pianos, and a spare, no-frills rhythm part. The fabric got here collectively in writing periods in England with Trendy Nature’s Jack Cooper and on tour with Cate Le Bon; Savage then recorded the album in 10 days with John Parish in Bristol. That sense of motion is inscribed in its swinging cadences and propulsive drums; the marginally off-kilter rendering of well-worn rock’n’roll tropes fits an album about trying again at dwelling from far-off.
Savage’s New York is likely to be a ghost city, inhabitants one: “Hollowed face stranger/Simply who would possibly you be?/Within the mirror, one thing’s crying/With the identical eyes as me,” he sings within the first music’s opening traces. In monitor after monitor, he mulls over recollections of neighborhood characters and late-night hijinks, considering all of the ways in which the town can grind you down. The lone exception is “Driving Cobbles,” a lighthearted fantasy of European idyll. A number of Songs About Fireplace performs out like a protracted, messy divorce from an adopted dwelling.
