Parts & Labor - Set of All Sets - Ernest Jenning Record Co.

Parts & Labor - Set of All Sets
$10.00 - $35.00

After a 14-year hiatus, prismatic noise-punk fireworkers Parts & Labor, a beloved institution of Brooklyn's '00s underground, re-emerge with a double-drummer lineup and colossal double album. The 79-minute Set of All Sets (July 10, Ernest Jenning Record Co.) is an expansive, blown-out gush of apocalypse-pop that imagines utopias and confronts the overwhelming weight of the infinite.

Their first album since 2011, Set of All Sets finds the band re-energized, rebooted and expanding their punk-kosmische, matching their skyscraping melodies and squelching electronics with hypnotic rhythms and frenzied tumbles of percussion. Parts & Labor co-founders Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw are joined by the simultaneous battery of drummers Christopher Weingarten and Joe Wong — asynchronous members during their critically acclaimed four-album run on indie rock titans Jagjaguwar. The power trios that made 2007's breakthrough Mapmaker and 2011's swan song Constant Future have merged into a single four-piece, at once a brand new vision, a clamorous continuation and a recapturing of the deafening sound of their "final" two shows in 2012. With eight weaponized limbs from two veteran drummers, Parts & Labor surges forth with rhythms inspired by Tanzanian singeli, ecstatic free improv and the motorik of vintage krautrock.

Friel and Warshaw beam with the most majestic and triumphant melodies of their career, windswept cascades of bubblegum Boredoms and Big-Music-gone-hardcore. Weingarten and Wong alternate between propulsion and chaos: Snares and roto-toms ping-pong across the stereo spectrum, junk percussion clatters and tumbles, robotic rhythms collide with frantic machine-gun blurs. As latticework rhythms cycle and distort, the group's three-part harmonies puzzle through lyrics about feedback loops, indecisiveness, the Anthropocene and quantum theory, all shouted through the language of rock anthems.

More than a decade since announcing their "indefinite hiatus," the band returns against all odds: Brooklyn's soaring rents have driven most of its members miles from their homebase and each other, Warshaw lives under the shriek of crippling tinnitus, the concept of "forming a band" becomes less of an economic viability every year, and both the music industry and world at large have essentially imploded. In turn, a band already steeped in paradoxes — noise and pop, ambient and punk, storm and calm — have created an album about building the impossible. "What if we built a house no one can live in," Friel sings in thrash-pop blast "Haunted Limbs." What if we wrote a song no one could play?" Songs like the Verhoeven-esque "Better Run" and percussion-phase ballad "Anti-Lions and Lemonade" invent utopias, a fitting vision for an album that conjures a punk orchestra from four musicians.

"It was 2021 and everything was fucked and the most interesting thing I could think of writing about was what if things went right," says Friel, "like actually having something perfect to strive for."

Other songs revel in the ungraspable concept of infinity, teeming with references to Schrödinger’s Cat, pseudoprimes, superposition, programming logic and Bertrand Russell — all serving as metaphors for the cyclical nature of life ("Repetition Nil"), the precipice of climate catastrophe ("Indecision Tree"), violence begetting violence ("Off By One") and decision paralysis ("Many Worlds").

The album's first single, "Endless Cycle" is the album’s maximalist scaffolding: a four-part, 20-minute epic split across the album's halves. The three-part "Descending" suite exploits the Shepard tone illusion to dizzying ends. The chord progression is constantly falling, never resolves and is designed to loop infinitely. The feeling of moving while staying in the same place conveys the feeling of our current social and political reality: sinking deeper into the mire of techno-fascism but made to believe that we’re progressing to some grand, utopian future. The album's epic climax is a shout-along that's equal parts catchy and contradictory: “Forever … For never.”

“If some certain quantum theories are true, everything that might exist, does exist through parallel universes. Grappling with that feels simultaneously full of promise and struck with grief, that anything is possible, but also that this is the universe we’re stuck with," says Warshaw "We wanted to turn towards promise, to build this thing against so, so many odds. To fight against our own inertia and fraying hope.”

From 2002 to 2012, Parts & Labor were an oppositional, exultant, D.I.Y. blare in the subterranean Brooklyn of loft parties, parking lot shows, musty warehouse spaces, $10 cover charges, sweaty handstamps and Todd P emails. While "NYC revival" bands gobbled glossy magazine spreads, Parts & Labor were leading lights of a noisier, scruffier, more art-damaged shadow economy alongside musicians like Black Dice, Oneida, Sightings, the USA Is a Monster, Zs, Tyondai Braxton, Aa, Japanther and more. Fusing neon pop hooks and the blistering squall that Friel coaxed from his upcycled Yamaha Portasound toy keyboard, the iconoclastic Parts & Labor were outsiders that could have existed alongside '80s SST bands, '90s Japanese noise units or ramshackle 22nd Century post-apocalypse wasteland troubadours. The anti-imperialist rhetoric in songs like "Stay Afraid," "Fractured Skies," and "Satellites" stood in sharp contrast to a music world bending towards dance-punk escapism and indie-rock introspection.

"It’s curious how little of the indie music from the aughts concerned itself with politics," author Ronen Givony writes in the recently released Us V. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York(Abrams Books). "For all the ruptures, chaos, and tragedy of the Bush era… the cultural response amounted to a collective numbness, trauma, and grief. No music stood in contrast to this tendency more than Parts & Labor."

In their decade of existence they released five albums and carried the Minutemen's "jam econo" torch through relentless, van-destroying tours across the U.S., Europe and Japan, playing shows with Mission of Burma, The Fall, TV on the Radio, Deerhoof, Battles, Melt-Banana, Lightning Bolt, Titus Andronicus, Oneida and many more. Their final bow, held at Brooklyn's 285 Kent in February of 2012, was a cacophonic send-off that united Weingarten and Wong on one stage and ended with the audience tearing the stage to pieces.

During the following 14 years, Dan Friel has released eight albums for avant-rock lodestar Thrill Jockey: four toy-keyboard scuzz-pop solo excursions and four LPs with his interstellar power trio Upper Wilds. Joe Wong has become an in-demand film and TV composer, penning the music for Emmy-winning shows like Russian Doll and Master of None alongside releasing a pair of psychedelic pop solo outings. BJ Warshaw has been co-running a multidisciplinary artist retreat, LEVEL, in a former Boy Scout cabin in Chapel Hill, NC since 2016. Christopher Weingarten has maintained a formidable career as a music writer and recently launched the all-star "artisanal white noise" app Fuzzzel.

However, the forces that Parts & Labor roared against in the '00s — war theatrics, the politics of fear, gentrification, American imperialism — remain an ongoing, metastasizing threat. Their return was inevitable, if only to drive more feedback into the feedback loop.

“It felt like all the things we were worried about back in the day – techno-fascism, authoritarianism, rapacious capitalism, societal division – were coming true if not getting worse," says Warshaw. "Reuniting has been a lifeline. The doing is the antidote.”