Posts Tagged Parts & Labor

Third of the Siren reviews: Parts & Labor

July 25, 2008 at 2:54 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , ,

So as you may have noticed, our treasured contributor Maxwell Jacobson posted a review this afternoon of an EP by The Gaslight Album that I will try to check out, though I won’t try to show Max up with a review of my own.  That would be poor form.

I caught about half of Parts & Labor’s set at Siren by my estimation, and what I saw was pretty good, but it kind of annoyed me that singer B.J. Warshaw (who had a cool, Matisyahu-esque beard) sounded as close to Billy Joe of Green Day as Ben and Nicole said that Victoria Legrand of Beach House sounded like Feist, though Nicole tells me that he sounds just as much like the lead singer of Brazil (though I’ve never listened to them) than Green Day, so I guess I don’t know shit.

Anyways, they weren’t as boring as Islands, but were by no means memorable, so I almost forgot that I could review them as my third, and probably final, Siren-related review.  I was trying to decide between the Dodos, to whom I’ve already listened a million times, or The Helio Sequence, whom I never saw at Siren.  But that dilemma was solved.

When I looked up Parts & Labor in various corners of the internets, I was told that they were noise rock.  Based on their latest album, last year’s Mapmaker, I don’t really believe that.  I think they’re a little out there, but not as far as say, Dragons of Zynth.  They sound pretty close to early Green Day as a band, just with some craziness added on top, so in that vein, they can be considered like punk, I guess.  I’m never quick to label something punk; I have very little experience in the genre, and my first instincts are normally wrong in regards to anything beyond, say, the Ramones.

It seems a bit shallow to say that the reason they’re considered noise rock is because they have noise, but that’s pretty much it.  They have standard, real songs, they just add a little weird noise either at the beginning, somewhere in the mix in the middle, or more likely, at the end.  That’s really all there is to it.

They all seem to be really good musicians, which is refreshing.  Drummer Chris Weingarten is unbelievable on this album, plowing through lots of parts with incredible speed on multiple drums that I’m really pissed I didn’t take notice of while I saw them live.  Another key difference that makes their CD experience better than their live experience is that keyboardist Dan Frier takes more of the singing duties than in the live set, which makes me think less of Green Day, which is good, because I like to have a band have their own identity in my mind beyond something “that sounds like this other band”.

Unsurprisingly, Mapmaker‘s best song is its opener, “Fractured Skies”, which comes in on an awesome drum beat by Weingarten, which gets layered on top of it a guitar effects loop, followed by heavily reverbed vocals that make it hard to make out the lyrics at all (this goes for the whole album, but strangely, I don’t see it as a problem this time; there’s enough stuff going on for the lyrics not to be necessary), which builds into a great crescendo and release.  Then the release gets even better when they add a brass section later – gotta love the huge sound.

Although from there on out, the pacing of the album varies, with slower songs like “Long Way Down” and “Ghosts Will Burn” smack dab in the middle, the ridiculously fast drumming of Weingarten keeps the energy up the whole way – and I do like the idea of putting some balls-to-the-wall drums in a ballad to fuck shit up.  Seems pretty badass to me.

Then again, this album isn’t perfect.  I think some of the noise flourishes go overboard, and I think that it’s easy enough to make the lyrics of a song intelligible – if you take the time to write them, why not allow them to be understood? But as I said before, the second one doesn’t really negatively impact the effect of the album, I just think it’s a bit n00bish.

P.S. – I realize this review was horribly written, but I’m tired of writing music reviews right now.  After my Siren review for BOTO, I may be refreshed, but I’ll try to get a couple of movies in the next few days, after my off day tomorrow.

P.P.S. – Look out for Nicole’s inaugural review on IAMDC; I believe it is a review of the show Sex In The City.  We’re all waiting with bated breath, Nicole.

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Siren Music Festival prep; Beck review

July 9, 2008 at 2:28 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m beginning to compile music from artists playing at Siren Music Festival, the festival of the free variety at Coney Island Saturday, 7/19 that I am looking forward to immensely.  I want to get to know bands so I can choose correctly between the two stages that will have acts then.  Bands that I will try to get to know better: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks (like I’m going to miss them anyway), Islands, Ra Ra Riot, The Helio Sequence, Jaguar Love, Annuals, Film School, Parts & Labor, and These Are Powers.  Anyone with a stock of recent albums by these guys shoot them my way if you please.  Reviews of these will probably come in some volume.

I’m a Beck fan, despite the fact that it’s no longer trendy to like him, and I even liked Guero a considerable amount, and didn’t think The Information was too awful.  The one gripe I’ve had with almost all of his albums though, has been that they’re just too long.  I try to appreciate albums from beginning to end, and I take points off personally when it’s a struggle to do that.  I think that the fact that Beck’s brand new album, Modern Guilt, is only 33 minutes long, is a positive stroke, and that alone will bring people back into his camp.

As many know, DJ Danger Mouse, whose genius is becoming more and more universally accepted, produced this album, and though it’s not as obvious as his work with Gorillaz on the awesome Demon Days, it obviously helps, and the tracks that are more unique for Beck (and thus, better songs, because unique Beck = good Beck) are the ones that Danger Mouse had a bigger hand in.

This album isn’t great, but thank God, it isn’t half bad either.  Unlike the great Beck albums of yore, the first track is decidedly not the best on the album – gone are the days of “Loser”, “Devil’s Haircut” and “Sexx Laws”.  The album doesn’t really get going until the last minute of the second track, “Gamma Ray”, when the instrumentation shifts a little.  I had a little “Awww yeah” moment there.  Third track “Chemtrails” is pretty good, as well, and gets way better in the second half.  It’s easily traceable to Mutations, though.

The title track, number four, is the first really good Beck track here.  It’s an insecure shuffle which I really enjoy, and as opposed to afore-mentioned Mutations and Sea Change, sparse instrumentation actually helps drive the pace along, á la Spoon.  The future-hating theme is accentuated by the canned strings in the latter portion of the song.  Fifth track, “Youthless”, is probably the highlight, mostly because, like “Modern Guilt”, it’s a little tough to place among the rest of the Beck catalogue.  It’s closest to Guero, but it moves a bit too fast, and the production’s a bit too slick.  It doesn’t fit Midnite Vultures either, it’s a bit to unsettled.  So here we go, unique Beck.  Awesome.

I’m not going to keep going track-by-track, but I will say that the album keeps going great until the last song, “Volcano”, which drags pretty badly.  But then again, what are you going to do, it’s the last song on a Beck album, that’s what last songs on Beck albums do.  Beck has never been perfect, merely awesome.  Here, he’s not awesome, merely very good.  I’ll take that at this stage of his career; hell, by this point in their career, Pink Floyd had fallen off a bit, so we can cut Beck a little slack.

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