Parts & Labor – Receivers

Brooklyn’s monopoly on harbouring some of the finest contemporary bands on the planet continues with this compelling curveball from noise-punk combo Parts & Labor. Daring though they’re known to be, the embryonic phase of their fourth album found them on particularly experimental form when they publicly appealed for field samples to construct Receivers. Collating and putting to use some 150 submissions throughout the course of the record, the results sound surprisingly more focused than the deranged gabber that the idea might imply.

From the rousing cacophony of Satellites onward, the quartet send Moogs, synths and bagpipes to war against snippets of simple conversations that sound profound in the context of the song, like one man having a set-to with another over a piece of litter he dropped because “the world’s already a dirty place, we don’t need to make it any worse”, as he records a personal monolog from his cruising car during the 70s. Organs and miscellaneous ghostly sounds swell and drop in tandem with manic rhythms while eight soulful tunes are crafted by genius patchwork. Although their name makes no bones about their way of working, Parts & Labor’s dependency on recycled components has never become them more than in this epic minute. [Dave Kerr]