White Fence

Parquet Courts and White Fence

Great American Music Hall

San Francisco, Calif.

January 16

The Great American Music Hall’s sold-out, co-headlining show featuring Brooklyn’s Parquet Courts and Los Angeles’ White Fence was a summit of current East Coast and West Coast music ideas. Parquet Courts, who performed first, played a set of angular, tense, verbose and sarcastic rock grounded in New York punk, indie rock and blasts of noise that recalled East Coast hardcore. Meanwhile, White Fence represented California’s latest wave of psych rock with a set that dug into Byrds jangle, British Invasion sounds, a touch of surf music and early Pink Floyd psychedelia.

Led by singer/guitar players Andrew Savage and Austin Brown, Parquet Courts played a lot of their set faster and more aggressive than on their albums resulting in a mosh pit forming near the front of the stage. On the slower moving “She’s Rolling,” Brown’s vocals shadowed Savage’s until the number went into a long instrumental jam. Later, “Master of My Craft” found Brown talk singing in a style that recalled the late, great poet and rocker Jim Carroll. Yet, despite the impressive clipped guitar grooves, one of the best songs in the set was the slower “N. Dakota,” which evoked the shrugged-off tunefulness of Pavement.

The crowd thinned out slightly by the time that White Fence guitarist/vocalist Tim Presley and his backing band took the stage. Before playing, Presley joked that he was going to move back to San Francisco since “everyone”—probably meaning Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer and Ty Segall—were relocating to Los Angeles.

White Fence goosed up their songs live with louder, messier and more rocking takes on their album tracks. “Get That Heart” from 2011’s Is Growing Faith was transformed from a low-fi, quirky ditty to a Dylan-esque rocker. “It Will Never Be,” a pensive highlight of 2012’s Family Perfume Vol. 1, was given the rock treatment with a few squeals of feedback and a serious guitar solo.

Though both groups played solid sets, neither act was able to blow the other off the stage with a truly transcendent performance.