Days are precious, people. Any minute could be your last. Do we really need another shoegaze album for 2009? Musicians look back twenty years for nostalgia revivalism, so it should be predictable that it feels like 1989 all over again, with one high-decibel screeching outfit dropping their latest toxic-by-demand release on the world after another. Back then, it was mostly the Brits doing it, but now the Yanks are leading the march. Brooklyn’s A Place to Bury Strangers offers little on the original side, offers a lot on the volume side. What we know of them hasn’t changed much since our last visit, and timing is inconsequential. No, I don’t need another screeching shoegaze album right now, but there’s always something to be said for the process of flattering a good melody with extra care and finesse and than flattening the shit out of it with effects pedals from hell’s gaping maw.
Those customized pedals were designed by frontman Oliver Ackermann, with a specific ear for glam-sized carnage and glum-shaped misery. It’s almost as if he’s winking at his audience, sharing a silent secret that he could rock your bloody socks off if he wanted, but instead drowns his riffs in hot white noise, flames, grease and industrial machinery so it sounds like a raw material factory is firing off inside your eardrums. Some would deride that as cruelty, the way the Fiery Furnaces used to f-ck with their fans by taking a precious little pop song and then splattering it like a Jackson Pollock piece. But that’s shoegaze for ‘ya, and that style is so hot right now.
It’s not their fault this vaguely-disinterested vogue is losing its excitability, and their gleeful wrecks aren’t nearly as muffled as they could have been. They sound like a cranky lot on Exploding Head, though a bit milder than their 2007 eponymous debut. And their fascination with the Jesus and Mary Chain hasn’t abated, though new inflictions are offered. As it was on A Place to Bury Strangers’ best track, “I Know I’ll See,” New Order’s dark dance beats are given some love on “Keep Slipping Away” (which is conveniently titled like a Trent Reznor jam because, um, it sounds like a Trent Reznor jam in gauzy chrysalis) and first single “In Your Heart.” But there’s more Ramones and Ronettes this time (always a favorite for shoegazer starting points), as well as some Nick Cave-esque vocal/lyrical dyspepsia and fonder love for their foundation’s heroes, especially My Bloody Valentine and early Ride. More unexpected: the opening riff of “Dead Beat” has the same surf cadence of the B-52s’ “Private Idaho,” but that’s quickly overrun by a deluge of grinding feedback.
Despite these stronger links to the world of melody and pitch, Ackermann and the band’s self-fatiguing reliance upon crushing reverb insists that they’re not suddenly in a welcoming mood. The mood is overpoweringly bleak and Ackermann’s separatist murmur gets lost in most of the impenetrable static. “Smile When You Smile” has one of the album’s most easily identified rock n’ roll rhythms (via industrial-hard drumming from Jay Space and Jono Mofo’s tidy, galloping bassline—Flea would be proud of the bridge) but the heavy-lidded vocals still wander aimlessly in the noisy potage on top, hollowly echoing and entirely disregarding meter. “Echo Death” crawls steadily out of the cellar like NIN’s “A Warm Place” to a pounding, funereal head-wracker (Ian McCulloch fronting the Bad Seeds?), finally reaching an ear-splitting climax that’ll blow your speakers. If, somehow, they survive intact for that one, kiss ‘em goodbye for closer “I Lived My Life to Stand in the Shadow of Your Heart,” which, believe it or not, has a segment where the guitar actually sounds like the Edge on an aggressive day before getting engulfed by a ravenous roar that had my whole room vibrating—and it wasn’t even close to full volume.
Before these delightful moments of aural punishment, though, A Place to Bury Strangers play the role of the great deceiver, opening the album up with an uncanny but not oppressively different frame of personality. The warping sound effects of opener “Is It Nothing” followed by the jackhammer industrial pop beats of “In Your Heart” and the vocal ache of “Lost Feeling” echoing of Robert Smith all set you up for something like Ministry trying to write their very own Seventeen Seconds. Although these songs are all certainly loud and emphasized by steel wool howls and hiss, there’s more thrust to both the rhythms and emotion than the fainter (and tougher to unearth) ones on their last LP. In the assaulting vortex that constitutes their calling card, the debate of production rears its head—should it have been cleaner or filthier? Bowled in the middle might feel like more cop-out than imperative, and relegates early listens with a certain blasé spirit. Not until you really let this thing drain your essence through revisits does it wholly snag you into its gloomy web. The brave and curious might be willing to recycle; will you?
