Parquet Courts played Acheron w/ Household & Amanda X (pics)

January 15, 2014

photos by Dylan Johnson; words by Bill Pearis

Parquet Courts @ Acheron 1/14/2014

Parquet Courts warmed up for some upcoming gigs on the West Coast, New Zealand and Australia with a hometown show at Bushwick’s Acheron last night (1/17), a small place for the band these days — they just made their network TV debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon earlier in the week. A couple notable things about the show: it was the first show with fill-in drummer Greg Rutheford, who’ll be sitting in on the imminent tour, as Max Savage (brother of singer Andrew) has school requirements. Rutherford played in one of Andrew’s other bands, Wiccans (as well as Bad Sports), so the transition was pretty seamless.

Second, the set featured a load of new songs as the band are currently recording the full-length follow-up to Light Up Gold, which has had some pretty good legs. The album came out in August 2012 and “Stoned and Starving” was still getting killed on Sirius radio’s XMU channel when I listened over Christmas (driving my parents car around in rural WV). I couldn’t get a good fix on the new stuff but it did seem like many of them were more instrumentally driven than the short, sharp ones on Light Up Gold or the new EP. About halfway through their set they kicked in with the Light Up Gold songs and the place began to bounce to the one-two punch of “Master of My Craft” and “Borrowed Time.” As someone who has listened to that album a whole lot, I still don’t tire of those songs live. Maybe they do, though.

I got there late which meant a) I was squashed in the back (place was seriously packed), and b) I missed both openers Household (who I like a lot) and Philadelphia trio Amanda X (whose songs on Bandcamp sound pretty good). Luckily, our photographer showed up on time and got pictures of the whole night.

More pics below…

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Household