A Place to Bury Strangers | Exploding Head

FRESH BAKED
in NYC
A Place to Bury Strangers
Exploding Head
Mute | 2009
B+

When it comes to Brooklyn bands, there are few as indisputably cool as A Place to Bury Strangers. Based out of Williamsburg, the band plays a detached mix of shoegaze and doom rock that evokes comparisons to bands like Joy Division, The Swans, and My Bloody Valentine — the trifecta of aloof, pretentious coolness. They’ve been called the loudest band to come out of New York and are, by anyone’s standards, noisy as fuck. Led by tech-head Oliver Ackermann, the band’s sound has caught the attention of bands like The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and The Jesus and Mary Chain, all of which have invited the band on tour. When not playing music, Ackermann and the band handcraft some of the nastiest guitar effect pedals on the market and sell them to other bands like Lightning Bolt, Wilco, and Nine Inch Nails. And in their spare time, A Place to Bury Strangers runs Death By Audio, which has been South Williamsburg’s dingiest practice space, venue, art gallery, and more recently uhh…maze.

With all this surrounding A Place to Bury Strangers, the band’s music has more-often-than-not received a critical pass. While the band’s lauded self-titled debut was a feat in druggy production, if you striped away all the feedback and atmospherics, there really wasn’t that much left. Delivered with the standoffish cool that typified gothy 80s pop, Ackermann’s lyrics were at best uninspired. And at times, the band ended up sounding like a dressed up version of the bands that came before them. Sure, it wasn’t a terrible debut; A Place to Bury Strangers can create nihilistic soundscapes like no other band. But in the process the band sacrificed songwriting at the altar of pretentious cool.

So now we have the band’s sophomore release, Exploding Head. Like the band’s self-titled full-length before it, Exploding Head is a record that unapologetically wears its influences on its sleeve. The distorted guitar melody on Exploding Head’s opening track “It’s Nothing” echoes the opening of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and Ackerman’s voice drifts from Jim Reid’s monotonous sing-speaking to Kevin Shield’s dry, spaced-out delivery. There are also intentional references to the bands that came before A Place to Bury Strangers: 43 seconds into “Keep Slipping Away,” drummer Jay Space drops the “dun, dun-dun, chik” drumbeat that was first featured in the intro to The Ronnettes’ “Be My Baby” and later became a somewhat of a shoegaze meme when it was cribbed by bands like The Boo Radleys, Clinic, Deerhunter, and most famously by The Jesus and Mary Chain (twice on the same record).

But unlike the band’s previous output Exploding Head’s references frequently come in the middle of songs which, if stripped of production tricks and effects, can stand on their own as actual songs with melodies, structures, buildups, and breakdowns. “It Is Nothing” finds Ackermann actually pushing his voice past simply imitating Ian Curtis to holding down a coherent melody. “Keep Slipping Away” is A Place to Bury Strangers’ most ambitious track to date. Over four-and-a-half minutes, the band develops a catchy circular guitar melody, slips into a half-time stomp, and then returns to the song’s opening melody, all without any wall-of-noise guitar squalls gumming up the mix. There are production tricks here and there, but they’re relegated to the background on tracks like “Exploding Head.” A Place to Bury Strangers is clearly learning how to hold back, and they sound better for it.

The band does fall back on some of the tricks that sunk their debut record. “Lost Feeling” is another doomy song that struts and frets with some of the fuzziest guitars put to tape but fails to mean much. And despite all the effects he puts on his guitar, Ackerman still has a hard time finding a coherent melody on tracks like “In Your Heart” and “Ego Death.” But unlike their first record, these are minor quibbles on Exploding Heart. For the first time, A Place to Bury Strangers has moved beyond simply sounding cool and actually sounds good. It’s a welcome change.

by David Marek