Parquet Courts are a band of sloppily-dressed white dudes who play pointed, angular guitar rock and whose sung-spoken lyrics are written from a wry, erudite, and sometimes detached point of view. So that means they will always have to deal with the Pavement comparison. It'll trail after them like vulture shadows until they finally expire. It's not their fault. It's not our fault, either. It's just a thing that happens. As someone who really likes Parquet Courts and can't stand Pavement, this has persistently driven me nuts for, what, four years now? And so I'm hoping that Human Performance is the moment that comparison finally goes away. It won't, but it should. After all, Pavement, lyrically, were about referential inside-joke opacity. Parquet Courts, historically, have had some of that in them, too. But Human Performance is the moment where they jump to another level, where they find powerful and particular ways to express weirdly universal sentiments that you don't often hear in music. For that reason alone, they're already as close to, say, the Modern Lovers as they ever were to Pavement. Can we all try throwing around that comparison every time we talk about Parquet Courts, for a change?