By: Rich Buley
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Released on February 17, 2015 via Dead Oceans
Cynical observers of the career thus far of A Place To Bury Strangers might point to the number of line-up changes founder member and chief songwriter Oliver Ackermann has experienced since the band’s live inception back in 2003, and argue that APTBS merely acts as a marketing vehicle for Ackermann’s rather successful effects pedal business, “Death By Audio”. Cynical observers who quite clearly have not heard a single second of their explosive, convulsive, noise laden punk rock.
2012’s aptly named third album Worship saw the band self-release on their own new label, Dead Oceans. It also marked a sea change (sorry) in production style, with the wilfully lo-fi scuzz of the first couple of albums replaced by a fuller, louder, more assured sheen. It was certainly approaching a more accurate representation of the band’s live sound – the ear-splitting, paint stripping, caustic noise of ‘Revenge’ being a prime example.
Following 2013’s mini album of Dead Moon covers, Strange Moon, we now have 4th album proper Transfixiation and I, for one, was hoping for a continuing development of the recorded sound of the band, where its current incarnation, singer/guitarist Ackermann, bassist Dion Lunadon and drummer Robi Gonzalez, would hopefully arrive at the musical destination sharing its name with one of Oliver’s pedals: Total Sonic Annihilation (but oh, in a good, good way).
Not that the band are all about noise, actually. The album opens with the bumbling bass and off kilter, skeletal riffing of ‘Supermaster’, not a million miles from the wonderfully distinctive, scabrous sounds of eighties Goth legends Bauhaus. Although the track does get buried and end in a torrent of feedback and distortion, as one has come to expect.
Former single ‘Straight’ arrives and what is immediately noticeable is the prominence and damn funkiness of the bassline. Lunadon’s playing here gives the band a more accessible, dare I say danceable edge, even with Ackermann’s extraordinary, one-off effects threatening to lay waste to proceedings.
‘Love High’ is under two minutes of APTBS at their most bloody-minded, discordant and visceral, and it is followed by the nearly equally short ‘What We Don’t See’, which begins chaotically, but then soon erupts into speeding, voracious punk, with guitar now centre stage and taking the alternative form of a very large and exceptionally angry buzzsaw. Oh yes.
‘Deeper’ takes things, er, (way) below where they were, and delivers a salient, verbal warning on the dangers of fucking with, riding with or even talking to the artist. Cynical observers, don’t say a word. Ackermann’s lugubrious delivery is matched by a fabulously distorted, mournful bassline, and some expertly pounded drums. It won’t hit the Radio 1 daytime playlist anytime soon (as if that’s a thing anymore), is one of the darkest and most arresting pieces of music I’ve heard in a while, and shows another side altogether to APTBS’s burgeoning repertoire.
‘Lower Zone’ is instrumental and experimental, beginning with tom-tom and swirling feedback, and fading out with semi eastern sounding guitar and habitual noise, before ‘We’ve Come So Far’ begins, as Poe would have it, A Descent Into The Maelstrom, a 5 track microcosm of why A Place To Bury Strangers are such an exciting, enticing band. The noise sections during the opening salvo of this assault on the senses are utterly compelling and entirely in context.
‘Now It’s Over’ continues the exhilaration, this time delighting with a more conventional song structure, some lovely, fuzzy melodies and an obvious candidate for the next single (as if that’s a thing anymore either), until ‘I’m So Clean’ takes a bloody great big sonic sledgehammer to any remote hint of niceness with some of the most blistering guitar noise you are likely to hear this year. If ever there was a good way of marketing Death By Audio…
Just as you think ‘Fill The Void’ is going to give you a break with its slowed intro, another accelerated bassline arrives, and off it goes, delivering another 4 minutes of scorched, incendiary punk. I can only begin to imagine what the moshpit might be like for this one.
Finally, with ‘I Will Die’, Oliver and current team decide to check out (yes, that’s another pun) in the only way possible with what has gone before, a colossal, heavily distorted 3 minutes of thoroughly modern, if slightly unhinged noise rock.
A triumphant, ferocious return for the band once labelled as New York’s loudest. Perhaps we should now also add ‘finest’ to that description. Their UK tour in April will give some of us the chance to judge both accolades for ourselves.
