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.
I Ate My DVD Collection 