The Justice

Media Credit: Tod Seelie

The indie-punk experimental band Parts and Labor played at Cholmondeley's last Saturday to a dense crowd of moody head-bangers. The band, on tour in support of its latest studio album, Mapmaker, actually sounds more shoegazey than punk, consistently playing big and loud songs with massive, anthemic drum beats. Their sound is also based around the synthesizer, which was annoyingly high-pitched and supposed to add texture to the mind-blowing gravity of the mammoth supporting instrumentation. Still, the band's grooves were widely varied as drummer Joe Wong went from spewing out rapid blast beats to banging out Afro-tribal rhythms or punk grooves. Generally though, Parts and Labor's songs were composed of three to four elements: a moving, repetitive synth line over huge drums over Dan Friel and B.J. Warshaw's ethereal vocalizations. I say three to four because sometimes Friel would take out his guitar and jab furiously at it to add another element of urgent, violent instrumentation.

But it was the ambling vocalizations that most evoked the shoegaze genre, as the microphone was drenched in reverb, giving Warshaw and Friel's voices that distant, dreamy sound that some people think is so cool and transcendent. Friel and Warshaw themselves were amusing to watch that night, dipping in an angular and desperate manner, which was obviously an appropriate choreography for the music they were playing. The first thing the bearded Warshaw said to the audience was, "What better way to say that our civilization is doomed than with a disco ball," commenting on the small disco ball that depressingly rotates on Chum's ceiling during.

The crowd seemed to receive the band well and some even requested an encore. The band obliged and played two more songs of massive, synth pandemonium.

Experiencing the opening act, local band Big Bear, was the same as experiencing what it feels like to be ruthlessly hit over the head. Not only was the music grating, aimless and piercing, but the band members literally mimed the motion of hitting someone over the head repeatedly. Their set was an assault of down-tuned discord with psychotic arpeggiated ascents and descents that bore a striking resemblance to M.C. Escher's "Relativity"-the famous print that depicts stairs going nowhere.

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