Parts & Labor release new single “Arterial Material”
Parts & Labor release new single “Arterial Material”
First New Album in 15 Years, Set of All Sets, out July 10 on Ernest Jenning Record Co.
Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York Shows Announced
Stream: “Arterial Material” on All Digital Platforms
Stream: “Haunted Limbs” on All Digital Platforms
Stream: “Endless Cycle Pts. 1 - 4” on All Digital Platforms or YouTube
On July 10 noise-punk firebrands Parts & Labor, one of the defining bands of Brooklyn’s 2000s underground, will release Set Of All Sets, their first new album in 15 years, via Ernest Jenning Record Co. (pre-order). Today they are excited to share the album's latest pre-release single “Arterial Material” which is out today on all streaming platforms.
A frenetic blast of futuristic electro-punk, “Arterial Material” pushes Parts & Labor into new sonic territory. Whirlwind beats under vocals seething through personal medical ordeals: spine surgery, stabbing eye pain, prescription meds. The track opens with feedback generated from vocalist and guitarist BJ Warshaw’s hearing aids and audiology tests, while its Spotify Canvas features imagery created from his actual MRI scans.
On the song, the band's BJ Warshaw shares, “'Arterial Material' grapples lyrically with health issues and the challenges of navigating our frequently inadequate care systems. I wrote the lyrics long before the delusional, anti-science fever dream known as 'MAHA' came to prominence. On the one hand, the song confronts head on how hard it is to separate fact from fiction, to make sound choices when faced with dire side effects, to determine whether the latest trend is truly a miracle elixir or merely a pharmaceutical corporation’s cash grab. On the other, in spite of the frustrations I’m vocalizing around the slow deterioration of my physical self, I’m so grateful for the care I’ve received. The song kicks off with feedback generated from my hearing aids, prescribed to mitigate my fairly crippling tinnitus, alongside samples from my audiology testing. Nestled in the cacophony are audio samples from my various MRIs.”
Set Of All Sets is colossal double album featuring a double-drummer lineup. Spanning 79 minutes, it’s an expansive, blown-out surge of apocalypse-pop that imagines utopias while confronting the overwhelming weight of the infinite.
The band has announced tour dates in Los Angeles, San Francisco and NYC with an expanded 6-piece lineup. Tickets for all shows are on sale now.
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.
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.”
Parts & Labor Tour Dates
July 24 - Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon w/ PG14 & HLLLYH (ex-Mae Shi)
July 26 - San Francisco, CA @ Bottom Of The Hill w/ Evicshen & HLLLYH (ex-Mae Shi)
August 7 - Ridgewood, NY @ TV Eye w/ Oneida & Kinski
August 8 - Ridgewood, NY @ TV Eye w/ 75 Dollar Bill & Parlor Walls
photo by Tod Seelie
