SXSW: Employment Figures
| By Kriston Capps - Mar 15th, 2008 at 3:39 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog | Live Blogging the SXSW Music Festival |
How appropriate that a band named Parts & Labor faces both turnover and new hires before it arrives at SXSW. Last year, the noise-fi notables lost their drummer of three years, Christopher Weingarten, who left the band to pursue writing (with Paper Thin Walls among other outlets). Temporarily a two-piece, P&L found new drummer TK in September 2007. Then, shortly before embarking on a tour from the band's home of Brooklyn to Austin for the festival, the band brought on Sarah Lipstate (of Noveller). "We're now a four piece band trying to sound like a six piece instead of three piece band trying to sound like a five piece," the band's Web site declares.
Do more with less: an important directive for any venture, and one that P&L has internalized. Supported by the new guitarist and drummer, founding members Dan Friel (vox, keys, noisy stuff) and BJ Warshaw (vox, bass, noisy stuff) manages an impressive wall-of-sound effect. When the fuzz kicks in on "Fractured Skies," the opener for the band's indoor set opposite Jens Lekman, you might be listening to a half-dozen pedal-enabled GIbsons and twice as many Marshall stacks supporting them.
Does it make any sense to say that a noise band sounds a little bit raw? Warshaw plays his electric bass with a slide, not a pick. There are more chords connecting Friel's synth set up than most bands use for an entire show. The music was heavy enough, for sure, but the group traded energy for precision—and guitarist Lipstate didn't seem to be entirely integrated into the sound yet. And while the monotone vox work on P&L's recordings, live, Friel and Warshaw's voices fall in the range between an enthusiastic public rally speech and a throat-scream. I kept hoping that Lipstate might step up to a mic to add some higher-register pitch to the group's sound, but it wasn't going to happen.
Wishful thinking. To be sure, the band took to the small stage on a night chock full of performances and created that thick, unrelenting noise, the kind of heavy focused sound that seems to fill up the space between stage and audience like a lead weight. Then, as he was playing the third song, Warshaw beckoned everyone to press the stage—bringing a small crowd right into the sound.
Do more with less: an important directive for any venture, and one that P&L has internalized. Supported by the new guitarist and drummer, founding members Dan Friel (vox, keys, noisy stuff) and BJ Warshaw (vox, bass, noisy stuff) manages an impressive wall-of-sound effect. When the fuzz kicks in on "Fractured Skies," the opener for the band's indoor set opposite Jens Lekman, you might be listening to a half-dozen pedal-enabled GIbsons and twice as many Marshall stacks supporting them.
Does it make any sense to say that a noise band sounds a little bit raw? Warshaw plays his electric bass with a slide, not a pick. There are more chords connecting Friel's synth set up than most bands use for an entire show. The music was heavy enough, for sure, but the group traded energy for precision—and guitarist Lipstate didn't seem to be entirely integrated into the sound yet. And while the monotone vox work on P&L's recordings, live, Friel and Warshaw's voices fall in the range between an enthusiastic public rally speech and a throat-scream. I kept hoping that Lipstate might step up to a mic to add some higher-register pitch to the group's sound, but it wasn't going to happen.
Wishful thinking. To be sure, the band took to the small stage on a night chock full of performances and created that thick, unrelenting noise, the kind of heavy focused sound that seems to fill up the space between stage and audience like a lead weight. Then, as he was playing the third song, Warshaw beckoned everyone to press the stage—bringing a small crowd right into the sound.
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