After nearly 10 years together, Brooklyn trio Parts & Labor has its basic sound down cold. They're a curious hybrid, combining a Lightning Bolt sonic sensibility with a Foo Fighters gift for melody. If you've spent any time going to noise shows in scuzzy basements or dank warehouse apartments, you'll recognize plenty of the ingredients they use: trebley keyboard-squeals, busy drum thunder, bellowed stentorian vocals. But they always put this stuff in the service of huge, meaty, cathartic songs, often building up to the sort of fists-up crescendos that used to move arenas in the 1990s. Parts & Labor have plenty of songs you can hum in a shower-- certainly not something you can say about most of their Brooklyn contemporaries. Within America's noise-rock underground, Parts & Labor are a rare beast: A band that cares more about rock than noise, and a band that actually makes sure their noise pushes their rock harder.
Over the past few years, Parts & Labor have switched their lineup a few times. On their last album, 2008's Receivers, they'd become a quartet, with the addition of guitarist Sarah Lipstate. Lipstate is now gone, and they're back to being a three-piece. But on Constant Future, there's never any sign of whatever intra-band turmoil they might've gone through. Instead, they sound more identifiably like themselves than ever before. The band is fully in their aesthetic wheelhouse here, never attempting anything like the two seven-minute tracks they did on Receivers. Instead, every track has the same combination of blown-out noise and burly hooks, and their blend of those two things suddenly feels something like comfort food.
Again and again, co-leaders Dan Friel and B.J. Warshaw push their heavy, utilitarian voices further than you'd expect by finding a serious harmonic chemistry in their vocals; two of these guys, for whatever reason, sound way better than one. The songs tend to start with a single, simple melodic idea and then layer on from there, keeping their basic buzzing riffs laudably simple. When the tracks build up for a few minutes, they usually extend their guitar fuzz to oceanic levels, but things move quickly, and they never get ponderous. The title track has a shamelessly hooky melody that recalls the Butthole Surfers' fluke alt-rock radio hit "Pepper", of all things. And in a different time, Parts & Labor could probably run a chance of scoring a fluke radio hit of their own.
The band has a fun, physical sound, and they never once move away from that sound on Constant Future. That's a formulaic approach to writing an album, but it's an approach that works; every one of this band's albums is worthy of hard-drive real estate. Constant Future doesn't much build on previous albums, stylistically or qualitatively, but it displays a group of now-veteran dudes who know their strengths and who never stop playing to them. There's a lot to be said for doing one thing and doing it well, and that's what Parts & Labor do here.
