4KNOTS VIDEO OF THE DAY: “STONED AND STARVING” BY PARQUET COURTS

When you watch a pro basketball game these days, the squeaks of the players’ sneakers hitting the wooden parquet floors can pierce the ears in ever-more-annoying ways. Fortunately, any squeaking coming from the sounds made by Brooklyn-based four-piece punk band Parquet Courts are ear piercing in only the best ways. Lead singer and guitarist Andrew Savage, his brother and drummer Max Savage, bassist Sean Yeaton, and guitarist Austin Brown make beautiful, shrieking noise on their sophomore full-length, 2012’s Light Up Gold (Dull Tools, What’s Your Rupture?). Evoking Nick Cave, Jim Carroll, and Sonic Youth, Parquet Courts tear through fifteen tracks on the disc, stating their mission on the opening song, “Master of My Craft,” in which Andrew proclaims, “People die / I don’t care / You should see the wall of ambivalence I’m building.” The follow-up to 2011’s American Specialties also includes such self-explanatory tracks as “Donuts Only,” “Yr No Stoner,” and “Stoned and Starving”; that last track is especially likely to appeal to many of the people who show up for the free 4Knots Music Festival at the South Street Seaport on June 29, when Parquet Courts join Kurt Vile & the Violators, Marnie Stern, the Men, White Lung, Heliotropes, Hunters, Reigning Sound, the Babies, Fat Tony, and Steve Gunn. “I went to a shrink and he found my brain / and I have no ideas is what he found,” Andrew sings on “No Ideas.” But they have ideas aplenty, both lyrically and musically. As Andrew writes on the album’s liner notes, “This record is for the over-socialized victims of the 1990s ‘you can be anything you want,’ Nickelodeon-induced lethargy that ran away from home not out of any wide-eyed big city daydream, but just out of a subconscious return to America’s scandalous origin.” Is he sure the shrink found his brain? Perhaps we’ll find out on Saturday.