Parts & Labor
Zen Palate, NY
Interview by Arye Dworken
Photographs by Christopher Weingarten

When first meeting the three members of Parts & Labor, you might mistake them for the quiet kind. They're reserved and genial, the sort of guys you'd invite to your book club. Intellectual-looking singer/guitarist B.J. Warshaw and self-proclaimed geek and drummer Chris Weingarten both have ungroomed beards and thick-framed glasses. Keyboardist Dan Sniel has unbrushed golden-orange hair and a goofily accommodating smile. They're obliging, gracious and genuinely chill.

And then you hear their music.

Parts & Labor's sound is anything but chill. The local threesome's songs are ferocious, volatile, and unrepentantly explosive. Their newest record, Stay Afraid, is the perfect amalgamation of noise and melody and brings together the band's strong melodic sensibilities with its penchant for detonating music like megaton bombs. Weeks back, I saw P&L play live at Brooklyn's Northsix and left mouth agape. While most noise bands lose their structure in the chaos, Parts & Labor project their raucous blasts in equal measure with the memorable hooks. Watching Chris Weingarten drum is alone worth the cost of admission; he's a bonkers machine-gun drummer who puts Animal to shame. The Parts & Labor experience is a head-rush, like drinking a frozen Slurpee too quickly-but unlike the musicians involved, the result is certainly not quiet and chill.

What was your first instrument?
B.J.: It was a saxophone. And I'm mildly embarrassed about it, but I was a band nerd and I was listening to jazz, like Charlie Parker and Coltrane. In college, I started listening to more obscure noise stuff like the Boredoms, but I was first really into jazz.
Chris: I was a total music nerd, but I was focused on alternative. Like I would watch MTV's 120 Minutes 100 Top Videos of All Time and write down each video. I also had an intense hip-hop phase. And I've been playing the drums since about 5th grade.

How do you play drums like that?
Chris: First of all, I'm not in the best shape and I drink like, three bottles of water during sets. But I had always assumed that this was the way everyone played. I saw Dave Grohl play on MTV and I wanted to emulate him. When I first started playing, I couldn't figure out why everyone wasn't playing like that. But it also came from being the fat white kid and I had a lot of pent-up aggression. Especially not being athletic.
Dan: My first memory of Chris was one of the worst shows Parts & Labor had ever played. None of us were playing the same song at the same time.
B.J.: And Chris came over to us and said, 'That was the best show ever!' Completely sincere.
Chris: [Laughs] It totally was.
Dan: So when we needed a new drummer and someone suggested Chris, we were like, 'Hmm, he thinks we do something different than what we really do.'

Did you have try-outs for a new drummer?
B.J.: Absolutely. We put up flyers around town.
Dan: Chris tried out and we decided to have him join the band-but when we called to ask him, he turned us down.
Chris: I was so turned off by being in bands in Florida that being in a band again was the dumbest thing ever to me. I auditioned because I figured that I would be bummed if I hadn't. But actually joining a band? Why would you want to do that?

How do you get all the instruments to stand out distinctively as opposed to all the noise melding together?
B.J.: Well, you saw us play at Northsix. When we're playing at pizza parlors in Indiana...
Chris: Both of these guys are very good at finding space for their varied frequencies.

Parts & Labor is essentially ugly noise clashing with melodic sensibilities.
B.J.: That's our songwriting sensibility, more or less. We write songs that you could play on acoustic guitar but we fuck them up to the best of our ability. But our sound isn't so innovative. I think melodic noise has been around for a long time-since Sonic Youth formed.
Dan: The thing that excites me about the band now is that we sound like I thought we were going to sound when we started Parts & Labor. It's taken us a while, but it's a good groove to be on.

Lyrically, Parts & Labor is also very politically and socially aware. Critics are attributing a very current relevance to the words.
Dan: It's who we are. We are always conscious of the world around us.
B.J.: It would be disingenuous to say that our lyrics are not a response to the world's current condition and political environment. And even if 9/11 didn't happen, I'm pretty sure our lyrics would have been bleak anyway. All of this didn't happen overnight. We've been building up to this war. And besides, I think it would be a waste to write sexy lyrics about girls. What a wasted opportunity?
Chris: The thing I like about the lyrics is that they're not like Rage Against the Machine but it's like, 'What's going on here? We're freaked out, too.' It's not suggesting solutions because we don't have any.
Dan: We feel like there's this general sense of helplessness in the world right now and we want our songs to reflect that sentiment.
B.J.: And our music is a response to that. The chaos and the noise is what we're hearing, so that's what we play.