Berwyn - Demotape / Vega - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Originally released in 2012, Light Up Gold is being made available via Rough Trade Records on November 28, 2025.Light Up Gold - Parquet Courts first proper LP - is a dynamic and diverse foray into the back alleys of the American DIY underground. Bright guitars swirl serpentine over looping, groovy post-punk bass lines and drums that border on robotic precision. While the initial rawness of the band's early output remains, the songwriting has gracefully evolved. Primary wordsmiths A. Savage and Austin Brown combine for a dynamic lyrical experience, one part an erudite overflow of ideas, the other an exercise in laid-back observation. Lyrically dense, the poetry is in how it flows along with the melody, often times as locked-in as the rhythm section.InchThis record is for the over-socialized victims of the 1990's '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, Inch writes Savage in the album's scratched-out liner notes. Recorded in an ice-box practice space, Light Up Gold is equally indebted to Krautrock, The Fall, and a slew of contemporaries like Tyvek and Eddy Current Suppression Ring.Though made up of Texan transplants, Parquet Courts are a New York band. Throw out the countless shallow Brooklyn bands of the blasé 2000's Light Up Gold is a conscious effort to draw from the rich culture of the city - the bands like Sonic Youth, Bob Dylan, and the Velvet Underground that are not from New York, but of it. A panoramic landscape of dilapidated corner-stores and crowded apartments is superimposed over bare-bones Americana, leaving little room for romance or sentiment. It's punk, it's American, it's New York... it's the color of something you were looking for. Album Tracks 1. Master of My Craft 2. Borrowed Time 3.

Romford's finest Berwyn has already made a tape which got him signed to Columbia and nominated for the Mercury Music Prize so he's gone back into his bedroom and made another. This one is less a mixtape and more of an eleven song album which despite all the lo-fi mumble-rap imagery is going to be absolutely massive. Pretend you got in there first. Album Tracks 1. Wrong Ones 3 42 2. I'd Rather Die Than Be Deported 2 38 3. Rubber Bands 2 52 4. 100,000,000 3 12 5. Snakes on My Nokia 4 09 6. To Be Loved 3 09 7. Full Moon Freestyle 4 10 8. Money Comes and Money Goes 3 02 9. Teddy's Joint (Chords to Make You Cry) 3 09 10. Vinyl 3 13 11. Answers 4 05

Who Am I is a vivid and vulnerable journey through Berwyn's search for meaning and freedom. In a 13-track exploration of himself and the many forces, memories and places that have shaped his life emerge beautifully crafted and cohesive reflections on faith, on the tugs of addiction and the embrace of love, on what it means to be demonised for your immigration status or skin colour. Bound together by a rich, layered and predominantly self-produced musical soundscape, Who Am I is about the long road walked towards internal liberation and the power of finding resilience in the everyday. Album Tracks 1. Bad Thing 2. Who Am I 3. I Am Black 4. All She Ever Wanted 5. Hate 6. Dear Immigration 7. Neighbours 8. Meet Me By the River 9. I'm Drowning 10. Love Is Blind 11. Without You 12. Mama with the Monks of Weston Priory