After a 14-year hiatus Parts & Labor have returned with the monumental 17-track, 79-minute opus Set of All Sets and they do not disappoint. During the months before its release, about half of the album was released piece by piece (a song at a time) on Spotify and on Bandcamp, and as a result I was sufficiently hyped before we even arrived here at the release. I’m from a certain generation where I look at album lengths and automatically associate them with their ability to fit on a CD-R, many of which in my day maxed at 80 minutes. Parts & Labor give us this generous helping and even leave us with an extra minute’s worth of space for your CD-R, a minute you can use to reflect on the auditory explosion that just took place over the course of this album.
Do you know Parts & Labor? Despite that they came up with other more popular Brooklyn favorites during the so-called (by me) “hipster era,” such as Grizzly Bear and LCD Soundsystem, Parts & Labor aren’t a household name like they should be. Their sound can be described as in-your-face-catchy, with very memorable songs. I’d take it a step forward to call it a melodically-noisy-keyboardy-rhythmic beast. You can sing along to the punchy keyboard leads or maybe hum or whistle (if you’re the humming or whistling type), but then you could have just as much fun air-drumming these beats like you would to “In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. But, and I mean this for the Set of All Sets album in particular, it would be Phil Collins on a lot of steroids. These rhythms are very very muscular.
And they’ve always been a very rhythmic band, but here on Set of All Sets, Parts & Labor feature both of their most recent drummers – 1: Christopher Weingarten, who had been drummer from 2004 to 2008; and 2: Joe Wong, who’d replaced Weingarten and played with the group originally from 2008-2012. You might picture the full sound this could bring to a live show, but wonder, does this have so much effect on the recorded album? Simply put, it does. For a quick example of the results here, and if you’re short on time, just check out “Endless Cycle Pt. 4: Working in Storm” and witness an exciting drum-off, with one drummer in the left ear and one in the right. But there’s crazy drumming to behold throughout the whole album…so….if you’ve got 79 minutes, just saying.
Indeed Set of All Sets is quite the new object of my repetitive spins on that digital vinyl known as Spotify (although again, you can go the Bandcamp route as well! Bandcamp is where I found the description of “apocalypse pop”, which I found novel and appropriate.) Whichever way you make it to the album, play it loud because it’s clearly meant to be played that way. Looking at it next to the group’s previous albums, the production is definitely…different. Everything about this album is big. It bursts from the speakers. Their other albums don’t really sound like that and if they were to be remixed in this style I’d be pretty happy about it.
Big! “Endless Cycle Pt. 1: Repetition Nil” opens with a slow atmospheric buildup before springing to life a few minutes in. You might not know what you were getting yourself into until atmosphere is punctuated by bolts of sound that seem to shake the world. Throughout the album there’s more of that cinematic sound but minute-to-minute there’s a lot more of the earth-shaking. I’d say If you’re just looking for the maximum ratio of catchy to chaotic, “Haunted Limbs” balances a catchy melody with a blastbeat to make sure you’re paying attention.
If there were a pause to the crazy drum madness, and if there were to be a pop single on the album, it would be “Anti-Lions and Lemonade,” a keyboard chord progression with a simple clicking rhythm that is a little more focused on the vocal melodies. It eventually gets a little noisy too but still stands out from the rest of the album as a little poppier. Maybe this could be a way in to the album for someone testing the waters. Although you might warn them the rest of the album pretty much sounds like fireworks going off.
The overall point is, there’s a lot of energy and a lot of fun to be had on Set of All Sets, and simply the fact that after 79 minutes of music I don’t feel like I’ve been listening to something for 79 minutes speaks to that. It doesn’t get old even at its sprawling length, and that’s a major feat. This is a good option for Album of the Year for me.
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