8-12-08 Parts and Labor – Nowheres Nigh

I am rather excited about today’s neat thing, Shanoah.

I’ve wanted to put the music of the Brooklyn wall-of-noise outfit Parts and Labor on this blog for a long time now. (If you think you’ve heard Parts and Labor here before, well, maybe you have) Problem is that most of the YouTube videos out there are from live performances with poor audio quality.

This is a problem cos I’d almost call Parts and Labor a strictly studio band. This statement is given the lie by the fact that they obviously kick ass live (or at least they do in the many live performances up on YouTube), but it’s nevertheless partially true. Noise rock in general, despite its name, can be full of subtleties and complexity, despite its name, and Parts and Labor’s sound is no different.

Like I’ve said before, they can come at you with the hammer of the gods, but trailing the hammer are drones, dirges and lots of high-frequency and (dare I say it?) delicate sounds that don’t survive a big concert amplifier, a teeny video camera mike or YouTube’s compression algorithms very well. Such music deserves to be contemplated in a smaller venue – headphones, perhaps, or computer speakers.

Well, I finally figured out a way to post their music yesterday (post a link to the free MP3s on their site… duh), shot off an e-mail to them for permission and received a response in gratifyingly short time. That’s why your neat things for the next three days will be from Parts and Labor.

Your first neat thing Nowheres Nigh. This is from their newest album Receivers, of the Jagjaguwar label and due out Oct. 21. (One Neat Thing a Day is actually ahead of the musical curve for a change? Isn’t that a sign of the Second Coming?) It sounds like it’s going to be a killer album. They asked on their Web site for sound samples that they could use for the album and, according to Jagjaguwar, managed to use every single sample that they got. Listen to it through the link below (the one that says “Parts and Labor – Nowheres Nigh”), download it and then buy buy buy when it comes out in two months.

Parts and Labor – Nowheres Nigh (MP3)