Album Of The Week: Parquet Courts Sunbathing Animal

What a great day for punk rock. My real favorite album of the week is Fucked Up's bleary, anxious, grown-up hardcore masterwork Glass Boys, a grand and surging piece of work that I can't write about because they're my friends. (Our own Chris DeVille did well with that album in his Premature Evaluation, anyway.) This is also the week of Bob Mould's Beauty & Ruin, a stripped-down and straightahead collection of pogo-worthy songcraft from one of our great old masters, a guy who's on a remarkable late-career hot streak. Priests, a D.C. band with a ton of promise, come out blasting with their wound-up and tough Bodies And Control And Money And Power EP, which you should really check out. (Another of today's best albums has nothing to do with punk rock. It's Walkmen frontman Hamilton Leithauser's regal solo debut Black Hours, which I came very, very close to naming as this week's AOTW.) And then there's the New York band Parquet Courts, whose tense and tangled and conversational take on punk rock wriggles and buzzes and sprawls, getting under your skin in all sorts of ways, on Sunbathing Animal, the band's second album.