In 2012 Brooklyn noise punks Parts & Labor played a celebratory show to mark ten years of the band and then went on indefinite hiatus. As it turns out they took about a decade away before starting to work in secret upon their return. As comeback records go Set of All Sets is not meek. It’s a 79 minute long double album, vast in ambition and huge in sound. It is a shining gift, dense with ideas and joyous melodies of sky punching emotional uplift delivered in a multi coloured hail of noise, the kind of thing that does your heart good.
It’s a lot. They do what they can to ease you in gently with two and a half minutes of calm, near ambient, melodic foreshadowing before the album fully arrives in dramatic, splintering force. This is the beginning of the four part ‘Endless Cycle’. An epic reintroduction, its first couple of parts kick off the record with the third and fourth signalling the second half. There’s also a recurring piece called ‘Descending’ that divides the album into quarters. Despite which an assault on clear structure accompanies the one distortion makes on melody. ‘Endless Cycle Pt 1’ (blessed with the title ‘Repetition Nil’) chops abruptly short and glitches into Pt 2. ‘Many Worlds’ opens on a barrage of random synth noise bursts before it hits an uptempo krautrock beat and is wiped at its close by a wave of distortion.
While the album is marked throughout by noise it’s notable how they layer and manipulate chunks of it in ways that seem to emphasise it as recorded sound. ‘Arterial Material’ begins with feedback from BJ Warshaw’s hearing aids and features samples from MRI’s and audiology testing. It also contains a disconcertingly long pause that’ll make you think your stream/CD/Vinyl has somehow failed the first time you play it.
Despite all this stuff it never feels difficult or drags, it absolutely rattles along, dipping and swerving just enough so that the arrival of each new anthemic fizzing keyboard line feels as ridiculously exhilarating as the last. Condensed essence of the album ‘Haunted Limbs’ feels like being shot out of a cannon. In a good way. The churning distorto groove of ‘Seamripper’ bursts open into a widescreen chorus just when you think it’s not coming and the relatively mellow ‘Anti Lions and Lemonade’ is still overtaken by distortion.
There’s a vast amount of material that’s gone into this lyrically about maths and quantum mechanics and utopian communities and more which offers a promising reading list/rabbit hole if you wish. The central idea being something like, what if we didn’t despair, but made the radical decision to hope for the future, however delusional? More importantly they’ve channelled those ideas into music that carries that sense of possibility. Taking the old trick of melody buried in noise to a delirious extreme they make fizzing overloading circuits sound huge and hopeful. Set Of All Sets is a dazzling widescreen epic that remains thrilling all the way through.
