- Everyone knows that the annual Laneway Festival is great fun, but there have been occasions where amongst all the tastefulness you find yourself wishing that someone would just cut loose on a beat-up old electric guitar. One of my biggest Laneway saviours over the years has undoubtedly been Parquet Courts, the tousle-haired New Yorkers who transform their brainy post-punk rambles into simply exciting rock and roll in a live setting. 

It’s that blend of the head and the heart that they juggle most effectively on their new album Human Performance. There’s an intelligent accessibility to the album as a whole, summed up handily in opening track Dust – tuneful, raucous and endearingly rough around the edges.

More than ever, singer/guitarist Andrew Savage delivers his anxious monologues in an appealing, raggedly melodic baritone as much as the rhythmic yelps that famously propel the band’s more spirited material. This is perhaps most apparent in the record’s title track, about as close to an earnest heart-on-sleeve ballad as you might find from this band. Steady On My Mind goes for dreamy country-psych like Pavement at their more leisurely.

Elsewhere, One Man, No City skips along with unexpected dollops of bongo, building to a coda of splintery Venus In Furs-esque guitars. Berlin Got Blurry throws in vintage Elvis Costello phrasing blended with an insistent rhythm section and a twanging guitar hook.

It’s not a Parquet Courts record if they don’t have a shouty punk song here and there and while they are in relatively short supply, Two Dead Cops sticks pretty close to that particular template.

Ultimately, the album works because it veers from some of the band’s traditional elements but does not disappoint in any way. There is a richer, wider scope, but it is still unmistakeably a Parquet Courts record.

Along with some woodier, warmer instrumentation and an overall more contemplative tone comes the garage rock rawness and skewed pop sensibility which we’ve always loved in this band. This album might not be as head-rush exciting as 2012’s Light Up Gold but it’s undoubtedly one of their fullest, most satisfying recordings to date.

- Matt Thrower.