Dan Friel - Ghost Town

Released: 2008


The first solo LP by Parts & Labor co-founder Dan Friel is very odd album and one of my absolute favorites of last year. It combines elements of noise, ambient, industrial and glitch to create something that resembles a pop album from an alternate universe (perhaps one composed entirely of broken machines).

The best description I can come up with for what this sounds like is: the soundtrack to an NES game where a cowboy in the old west eats a bunch of 'shrooms and thinks about his mortality and the impact of the industrial revolution.

If you are familar with Friel's main band Parts & Labor this sounds kind like what would happen if you removed all the more tradional "rock" elements from P&L and replaced them with even more distorted keyboards. Kind of reminds me of the first Medicine album in that this isn't pop that has been slathered with noise like so much noise pop (i.e. Wavves) but instead pop that is made out of noise.

DL