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Sitting with APTBS through multiple listens, I eventually warmed up to it, finding an odd comfort in the pleading strains of “The Falling Sun,” and thinking the rest of it was, well, quaint noisy and quaint. I mean, in 2007, I was also, like 24, so I didn’t know any better and was incapable of forming an opinion on my own. The band themselves, back then, were certainly an acquired taste, but got repped with a “Best New Music” and an 8.4 rating on the holiest of holy, thus making it something that I JUST HAD TO LIKE. To The Innocent (Absolutely Kosher).Given their downward trajectory over the last three years, it’s weird to think that A Place to Bury Strangers was a band that I liked-let alone championed early on, after bringing myself to like them, following the release of their self titled debut in 2007. Satan Is Real tells the story of Charlie and Ira, and it’s a corker! The Davies and the Gallaghers have nothing on the original brother duo, The Louvin Brothers.
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There are no real bum tracks to point out, no easy scapegoats, the songs just don’t connect as quickly. And check out that messy-ass one string guitar solo! “Ego Death” starts out like a Suicide outtake and then roars to life on a monstrous fuzztone riff that hovers like a swollen gray raincloud. Dig the guitar that sounds like either sirens or heavy machinery buckling under its own weight, a liquid-metal bassline that never falters, corrugated tin-roof drumming, and expressionless vocals that menace and sneer without the slightest affectation. “Everything Always Goes Wrong” is just overloaded ultraviolence. “Deadbeat” is a rude blast of cyborg rockabilly, all heavy-trip crashes and squalling feedback overwhelming a lean one-note riff and a continual protestation of “Why? What the fuck? / Don’t play with my heart.” “Keep Slipping Away” conjures up the Cure when they were wearing red lipstick around their eyes and hanging out in graveyards penning ace tunes like “One Hundred Years” so, yeah, it’s mantric, crystalline excellence.
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New sonic textures and noises are aired with varying results. And I won’t lie, Exploding Head falls short of the good, simple, visceral thrills and warped perfection of their debut, even though this is a more cohesive listening experience (the debut was culled from a number of CD-Rs), there are some growing pains evident and it’s clear that guitarist/vocalist Oliver Ackermann, Jono MOFO (bass), and Jay Space (drums) felt they had to adapt or die.
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Bettering it would be a Sisyphean task, so the Strangers have wisely decided to change up their sound, adding elements of industrial Sturm und Drang, The Stone Roses’ ecstatic pop-trance, and postpunk monochromatics to keep things good and alien. Place To Bury Strangers, oft-dubbed the loudest band in New York (a sadly reductive way to describe such an exciting and rich listening sonic splatter), hit upon the perfect storm of teenage caveman surliness, The Jesus and Mary Chain god-awful noise, Gothic bleakness, and lost choirboy vocals, all buried under an itchy blanket of feedback with their self-titled debut. Place To Bury Strangers Exploding Head Mute