Parts & Labor Archives

50 Unheralded Albums from 2011

In just one more trip around the sun, another swarm of immensely talented but under-recognized musicians has harnessed its collective talents and discharged its creations into the void. This list is but one fraction of those dedicated individuals who caught our ears with some serious jams.

Contest: Win a five-day pass to CMJ 2011

From October 18 – 22, New York City’s finest venues, nightclubs, and theaters will be taken over by musicians, music-industry professionals, college-radio nerds, filmmakers, and critics. Yes, it’s back: the CMJ Music Marathon and Film Festival.

Notable bands scheduled to perform include: Trash Talk, Parts & Labor, Davila 666, A Place to Bury Strangers, the Doomtree crew, Talkdemonic, Mexicans with Guns, and Kylesa. Seeing so many concerts, screenings, and panels normally comes at a pretty steep price, but we’ve teamed up with CMJ to give away two five-day passes. Total retail value of one pass alone is $495 and will give its bearer access to any event, provided that it’s not sold out or at capacity.

To enter to win, fill out the form below by the end of Thursday, October 13. By entering your information, you’ll also be signed up to receive ALARM’s weekly E-mail newsletter, The ALARMIST.

Record Review: Parts & Labor’s Constant Future

Parts & Labor: Constant Future (Jagjaguwar, 3/8/11)

Parts & Labor: “Constant Future”

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In 20 years, we will wistfully misremember that all of indie rock sounded like a handful of reliable, definitive bands. It will be tempting to include Parts & Labor in that pleasant exercise of self-delusion. Then again, it wont make our memories any easier to process or simplify.

The electro-rock group’s co-founders, Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw, write lots of lyrical phrases that don’t express a simple opinion or definite image but are tempting to repeat like aphorisms. On the chorus of “A Thousand Roads,” one of the best songs and finest examples of what they’ve achieved on the new album Constant Future, they conjure up one of many fragmentary but astutely realized landscapes: “Come on, praise the progress made, the sharpened grays of a thousand roads / all delays, no lazy days, the latent phase of a thousand roads.”

It may be about touring-band life, or how America seems to measure its worth in paved surfaces. Because it’s not didactic or preachy, though, it can gradually sink in and play with your head, with the internal rhymes and alliterations indicating that there’s some coherent thought running through it that can’t wait to get out.

Parts & Labor’s music also sounds like it reads. Friel’s electronics crawl through the songs like power-line hum given life and dimension, but the hooks, punk-shout-along-worthy choruses, and Joe Wong‘s drums keep insisting that it’s going to make sense to your instincts.

Record Review: Thank You’s Golden Worry

Thank You: Golden Worry (Thrill Jockey, 1/25/11)

Thank You: “1-2-3 Bad”

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Thank You‘s third album, Golden Worry, proves that the Baltimore trio is a band worth rooting for, and one that’s a step closer to making clear what it wants.

Like a few other recent albums to come out of Baltimore — namely, Pontytail‘s Ice Cream Spiritual and Dan Deacon‘s Bromst — Golden Worry stages a good-faith meeting between experimental impulses and an enthusiasm for amiable hooks. This hasn’t always been the case with Thank You. On the band’s last album, Terrible Two, its obsession with rhythm threatened to dry up the guitars, keys, and vocals into a tuneless murk.

Thank You has a compact feel that sometimes works for it and sometimes against it. The drums clamber actively on top of the song, often taking the lead but not always filling up the low end, and the guitars work up a noise-rhythm complement that, while often aggressive, doesn’t pursue a lot of fun back-and-forth with the percussion. As for vocals, only sometimes there and only sometimes coherent, they’re another constant variable in an open-ended format. It might help to know that Thrill Jockey’s bio for Thank You credits each member simply with “everything.”

DIY Venue Spotlight: The Trunk Space

The Trunk Space offers Phoenix an alternative to “diets of TV, commercial radio, and mall fashion.”

This space was originally an art gallery, but its owners’ desire to promote avant-garde and non-commercial forms of expression led them to booking bands and hosting films, improv nights, circus sideshows, burlesque performances…basically, the antithesis of the mainstream culture diet.

The venue also has a full espresso bar, which makes all the experimental activity even more delicious.

What We’re Doing This Weekend

CMJ in New York, Voodoo Experience in New Orleans, four great nights at Chicago’s Hideout, — this weekend is packed. Shudder to Think, Shining, Coliseum, Fucked Up, The Eternals, sBACH, Deacon John, and Pillars and Tongues are all among our recommendations to catch live.

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