Parts & Labor's 'Set of All Sets' is a Glorious Overload of Noise-Pop Ambition
Fourteen years after their last album, Brooklyn’s Parts & Labor returned on Ernest Jenning Record Co. with the most Parts & Labor move imaginable: a 17-track, 79-minute double album with two drummers. Rosy Overdrive says it exceeds the band’s earlier work; Bandcamp Daily and SPIN both came calling. The old heads are right to be excited.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: With Christopher Weingarten and Joe Wong both behind kits, the record’s floor is a controlled avalanche — BJ Warshaw’s bass has to cut a channel through it, and the layered production keeps that density legible instead of letting it smear.
The Spatial Dynamics: Dan Friel’s fried keys and guitar sit way up front, but the band leaves the influences audible in the seams — krautrock pulse, free-improv skronk, even Tanzanian singeli’s hyperspeed logic — so the stereo field always has something rattling at its edges.
Standout Performance
The drum tandem, collectively. The four-part “Endless Cycle” suite works because two drummers can hold repetition and mutation at the same time — one locks the loop, the other pries it open.
Why It’s Certified
“Many Worlds” stretches eight minutes and, in Rosy Overdrive’s perfect phrase, sounds “like getting run over by a spaceship.” “Like They’re Here to Stay” rides a pied-piper synth riff; “Parallel Tracks” is the vintage high-energy noise-pop mode, unmatched when they chase it. Underneath the racket the record thinks about math, climate anxiety, and utopia — apocalyptic soundscapes with a hopeful engine. Fifteen years of silence, zero rust. Certified great.