Release date: July 10th
Record label: Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Genre: Noise pop, noise rock, space rock, art rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital
My first thought when I saw that Parts & Labor had reunited after an eleven-year hiatus was, of course, joy–they are, after all, one of the best bands of the 2000s, and more than likely responsible for the best “rock music” to emerge out of Brooklyn during the George W. Bush administration. My second thought was: well, who’s going to be the drummer? Was it going to be Christopher Weingarten, the music journalist whose frenetic, deranged playing pushed the power trio into lightning-speed territory in the first half of their legendary four-album run, or would it be Joe Wong, the film-scorer whose relatively refined style led the band through a swooning, space-rock evolution in the final half of their career? The answer, I’m happy to report, is both: on Parts & Labor’s first album since 2011, band co-leaders Dan Friel (guitar/keys/vocals) and BJ Warshaw (bass/vocals) are now a quartet rounded out by Weingarten and Wong behind simultaneous kits.
Parts & Labor were a card-carrying member of the technicolor 2000s underground noise rock movement, associating with the likes of Deerhoof, Melt-Banana, Oneida, and Lightning Bolt as they made their own aggressive, squealing, tinnitus-inducing (literally, unfortunately, in the case of Warshaw) version of pop music. If you’ve kept up with Friel’s work in recent years as leader of Upper Wilds, it’s more or less in the same vein–gigantic choruses and loud, distorted music–but with squelching synths and (especially early on) a neck-breaking tempo. It’s music for people who can get into both the aforementioned Lightning Bolt and power pop, although they were certainly also “punk” in their own way (they did a very good Minutemen cover on their best album, Mapmaker). I love Upper Wilds a lot (and I am excited for their upcoming fifth album, Mercury) but there’s nothing out there that did what those Parts & Labor LPs did.
And that includes Set of All Sets, the new Parts & Labor album. Because it’s more than what Parts & Labor used to be, somehow. It has twice as many drummers, for one. And it’s twice as long! For a band that stuck to clean forty-minute albums (and once put out an “EP” of fifty songs in under a half-hour), this seventy-nine-minute double LP is like nothing else they’ve ever done. So, all of a sudden, Parts & Labor are back and flexing by barreling through several lengthy space-krautrock tracks in completely new terrain for the band. And yet, it’s recognizably the same brilliant Parts & Labor underneath the makeup. There are plenty of moments in the four-part “Endless Cycle” song series that harken back to those earlier albums, from the choral refrain in Part 1 to the tuneful squall of synths at the start of Part 2 to the rumbling rhythms in Part 3 to the big finish of Part 4. Set of All Sets is more than a pop album, but when it’s particularly interested in being one–like in the jaw-dropping eight-minute “Many Worlds” (which sounds like getting run over by a spaceship) and “Haunted Limbs” (one of the most Dan Friel songs to ever Dan Friel)–it’s unmatched.
There are seventeen tracks here, and while the terrain is rugged and varied, there’s hardly much in terms of respite. Assuming you treat the “Endless Cycle”s as separate songs, “Indecision Tree” is the longest one, and you do get a little bit of a breather in its industrial scraping before it eventually takes off (and not long after that, Friel is once again bellowing at us in “Parallel Tracks”, a classic Parts & Labor trash-compactor pop number). Otherwise, nearly everything in Set of All Sets is unrelenting, pummeling catharsis, although sometimes that can be as simple as the pied-piper synth riff that leads us through “Like They’re Here to Stay”. That little detail is key to why Set of All Sets works–beyond the glitzy, overwhelming exterior is the intricacies of a world all to itself.
Rosy Overdrive 