Addictive Tune for the Day

On Light Up Gold, their break-through second album from 2012, Brooklyn-based Parquet Courts established themselves as a great funky punky bar band with a get-in-and-get-out aesthetic. In the vein of The Ramones, The Minutemen and Wire, their songs were tight and melodic and smart and over just like that, with a running time usually of anywhere from one to three minutes. Their style and sensibility, however, was pure Pavement: songs about slackerdom and weed, invested with lively word play.

Since that terrific start, they seem to be on a roll, releasing one EP (Tally All the Things That You Broke) and two full-length albums (Sunbathing Animal and Content Nausea) in the last 18 months or so, and they seem to be branching out a bit as far as toying with their formula.

Clocking in at 7:38, "He's Seeing Path" (from Tally) is their longest song ever, well over twice their average length, but it's both hip and hypnotic, with the band's standard skewed street poetry bouncing off a hip-hop by way of Beastie Boys rhythm. Maybe I hear a little Talking Heads in there, too, circa Remain in Light. Definitely one of those songs where the world moves and it swivels and bops.

I've been playing it all day and have no plans to stop.