Parts & Labor - Set Of All Sets - LP

After a 14-year hiatus, prismatic noise-punk fireworkers Parts & Labor, a beloved institution of Brooklyn's '00s underground, re-emerge with a double-drummer lineup and colossal double album. The 79-minute Set of All Sets (July 10, Ernest Jenning Record Co.) is an expansive, blown-out gush of apocalypse-pop that imagines utopias and confronts the overwhelming weight of the infinite.

Their first album since 2011, Set of All Sets finds the band re-energized, rebooted and expanding their punk-kosmische, matching their skyscraping melodies and squelching electronics with hypnotic rhythms and frenzied tumbles of percussion. Parts & Labor cofounders Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw are joined by the simultaneous battery of drummers Christopher Weingarten and Joe Wong — asynchronous members during their critically acclaimed four-album run on indie rock titans Jagjaguwar. The power trios that made 2007's breakthrough Mapmaker and 2011's swan song Constant Future have merged into a single four-piece, at once a brand new vision, a clamorous continuation and a recapturing of the deafening sound of their "final" two shows in 2012. With eight weaponized limbs from two veteran drummers, Parts & Labor surges forth with rhythms inspired by Tanzanian singeli, ecstatic free improv and the motorik of vintage krautrock.

Friel and Warshaw beam with the most majestic and triumphant melodies of their career, windswept cascades of bubblegum Boredoms and Big-Music-gone-hardcore. Weingarten and Wong alternate between propulsion and chaos: Snares and roto-toms ping-pong across the stereo spectrum, junk percussion clatters and tumbles, robotic rhythms collide with frantic machine-gun blurs. As latticework rhythms cycle and distort, the group's three-part harmonies puzzle through lyrics about feedback loops, indecisiveness, the Anthropocene and quantum theory, all shouted through the language of rock anthems.

More than a decade since announcing their "indefinite hiatus," the band returns against all odds: Brooklyn's soaring rents have driven most of its members miles from their homebase and each other, Warshaw lives under the shriek of crippling tinnitus, the concept of "forming a band" becomes less of an economic viability every year, and both the music industry and world at large have essentially imploded. In turn, a band already steeped in paradoxes — noise and pop, ambient and punk, storm and calm — have created an album about building the impossible. "What if we built a house no one can live in," Friel sings in thrash-pop blast "Haunted Limbs." What if we wrote a song no one could play?" Songs like the Verhoevenesque "Better Run" and percussion-phase ballad "Anti-Lions and Lemonade" invent utopias, a fitting vision for an album that conjures a punk orchestra from four musicians.

Side A : 1. Endless Cycle Pt. 1: Repetition Nil / 2. Endless Cycle Pt. 2: Edges of Forgetting / 3. Many Worlds / 4. Descending
Side B : 1. Haunted Limbs / 2. Seamripper / 3. Arterial Material / 4. Anti-Lions and Lemonade / 5. Descending
Side C : 1. Endless Cycle Pt. 3: Better Run / 2. Endless Cycle Pt. 4: Working in Storm / 3. Indecision Tree / 4. Descending
Side D : 1. Parallel Tracks / 2. Off By One / 3. Like They're Here to Stay / 4. Set of All Sets