Parts & Labor preview

Parts & Labor
Empty Bottle, Chicago
Friday, May 4, 2007

Parts & Labor attempt to prove the (nearly) impossible: Noise rock can be catchy.

Let’s not blow things out of proportion: Parts & Labor aren’t Green Day. But they might be noise’s equivalent. In a genre whose inhabitants generally try to be as off-putting as possible, Parts & Labor – multi-instrumentalists Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw and drummer Christopher R. Weingarten (also a rock journalist) – love songwriting just as much as they do fucking with the sampler and pounding on a keyboard.

On Mapmaker (Jagjaguwar/Brah), the Brooklyn group’s third full-length, Parts & Labor do noise-for-the-sake-of-noise stuff like concluding “Knives And Pencils” with a fuzzy helter-skelter freakout or beginning “Ghosts Will Burn” with what sounds like the squeal of a vacuum with a shot belt. There’s plenty of droning feedback, of course, and sometimes Weingarten often acts more as a racket maker than rythmic base, but an odd thing happens among all this unruliness: real songs! Friel and Warshaw swap vocal turns, each providing lyrics that can actually be understood and, get this, attempt to give every song some melody and even succeed in constructing some pretty darn infectious hooks here and there. Fucked up, right?

Parts & Labor and Tussle open for Adult.

– Trevor Fisher

Click here to download Parts & Labor’s “A Great Divide.”

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly