Parts and Labor: Building steam

"It's interesting to try combine things," says Parts & Labor vocalist/bassist BJ Warshaw, "but I also think we alienate a lot of people out there. The people that really like harsh noisy music can't get with us because we're too melodic and we sing. And also your average indie rock band-- we're a little too ballistic and strange for the average listener. But people that get into it really get into it and that's kind of a rewarding aspect of doing what we do."

Straddling that divide between noise music and indie rock seems to be what Parts & Labor are all about. The Brooklyn trio's getting set to release their latest LP, Mapmaker, and to call it bracing would be an understatement. To put it plainly, Parts & Labor are not fucking around. Atop a high-pitched cycling drone that echoes Pete Townsend's looped keyboard at the start of The Who's "Baba O'Riley," album opener "Fractured Skies" bursts forth with a manic drum pattern that seems on the edge of running the song right off the rails. More loops-- of static, of climbing, oscillator-generated noise-- come in for support, but rather than push the song further out, they seem to bring it closer, and when the vocals come in, climbing in lockstep up a major scale, you begin to sense that this is a wall of sound built not to keep you out, but to give you something to climb and raise a flag of victory on. It's easy to see how it might be a troublesome sound for sensitive ears and people who demand more abstraction, but Warshaw's right: for the right listener (me, apparently) it's a heady mix of seemingly disparate musical influences.

"That's kind of been there from the very beginning," Warshaw replies when I ask about how this clash of sounds developed. "When people ask us this question, we sort of have the same stock reply that it has a lot to do with the music that we listen to. It's really as simple as that and kind of boring. [Vocalist/guitarist] Dan [Friel] grew up listening to a lot of grindcore and harsh noise stuff and free jazz and then also Sonic Youth, but then also got into indie rock in the late '90s-- later than most people. I played music since I was really little. I played saxophone as my first instrument and in jazz band, concert band. My parents liked Peter, Paul and Mary and Simon & Garfunkel and were a folk duo when they first met. And later on I got into a lot of punk and noise. It's sort of this combination of all the things we like about music mushed together in as interesting a way as possible."

Friel and Warshaw are the primary songwriters in the band, splitting songs and vocal duties. Friel's voice is slightly froggier than Warshaw's, lending tracks like the churning "Brighter Days" a tinge of Bob Mould, while Warshaw's slightly clearer tenor guides "Long Way Down" along a fractured groove into a noise rock freakout. The thread that connects all the songs on the disc is a chunky arrangement style that bundles the songs around little pieces of melody or rhythm and then basically playing the shit out of them.

"For the most part," Warshaw explains, "[Dan] and I will come up with a melody or an entire song and then arrange it on our own and then bring it to the band. And then from there, we collectively figure out how we're going to turn it into a Parts & Labor song. We'll collectively talk about what the drum beat and the feel is going to be. We're a little bit all over the place with the feels of our songs. We have a lot of straight pop-punk anthems and also some more pummeling Boredoms-y style or more Krautrock repetitive stuff, too. The long process is really just deciding what noises we're gonna put underneath the vocal melodies. I'm playing electronics and bass and Dan's playing electronics and guitar so we've got this pretty enormous vocabulary of sounds and textures we can use. It's a long process.

"To give you a more concrete example," he continues, "I wrote the melody for the song 'Long Way Down' on Mapmaker and originally intended that to be a straight psych-Krautrock jam-- like, really heavy and really loud and kind of midtempo. And we originally started playing it like that, but it didn't feel right. So we slowed it down and it ended up being this more pastoral, quieter song for us. Arranging kind of has everything to do with how a song ends up sounding for us in the end."

I might take issue with calling "Long Way Down" pastoral, but I get where he's coming from. For bands that rely on samples and loops, there's a real dilemma when it comes to putting the song together in a way that can be performed live and stay true to the studio sounds. It's a problem that first reared its head when drum machines came to prominence in the early '80s, but as the ability to replicate studio trickery in an organic way on stage has become more accessible, band's have solved it in many different ways. The Books create nearly full arrangements of music on DVD to go with their videos, contributing only vocals, guitar and cello to the live setting. Menomena compose their songs around whatever seems right at the time, feeding the bits into a sampling computer program, arranging them, and then doing their best to replicate the finished compositions live, in essence covering their own songs. Dosh recreates his loops from the ground up each time out, and Parts & Labor's approach is probably closest in spirit to that.

"We tend to put a lot of emphasis of being able to do what we do live," says Warshaw. "So pretty much what you hear on our records, we're able to duplicate live and just with three people. We have looping pedals, so we'll create our drones live and then they go through volume pedals so we can swell them in and out and we haven't done much where we're arranging while we're recording, while we're putting it into a computer. There's some exceptions to that rule-- for Mapmaker we recorded all our vocals and electronics ourselves and then went back to the studio for mixing and recorded all the drums in the studio. But the songs were like 90 percent completed and then we think it'd be cool if there were a keyboard melody in the background. We did a couple overdubs, but we really write for the live show, more than the studio record."

Ever since I got Mapmaker back in early March, I've had their show at the Entry circled on my calendar, because it's obvious from the record that they're absolutely going to bring it live. At SxSW, Menomena were fairly impressive in recreating the sounds on their album with just three members, but you could tell they were stretching beyond their reach on a couple numbers. If Parts & Labor can deliver on the live show promise displayed on Mapmaker, they'll be picking up bricks from the Entry off of tables in the Hard Rock Cafe and windows will be shattering on Summit Avenue in Saint Paul, just like when the Washburn A Mill blew its top in 1878.

Parts & Labor play Wed., May 2 at The Seventh St. Entry with headliners ADULT. 8 p.m. $10/$12. 21+. 29 N. 7th St., Mpls. 612-332-1775. Mapmaker comes out on Jagjaguwar Records on May 22. For more info on Parts & Labor, check out their official website at partsandlabor.net.