A PLACE TO BURY STRANGERS - EXPLODING HEAD

Album: Exploding Head
Artist: A Place To Bury Strangers
Year: 2009
Nation: USA (Brooklyn, NY)
Label: Mute (9420-1)
Sounds like: The color of television tuned to a dead channel.
Goes best with: strobe lights, tinnitus, that scene from Scanners (you know the one)
Highlights: "In Your Heart," "Ego Death," "I Lived My Life..."
Recommended if you're a fan of: The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, The Cure
Get it: download | vinyl

By 1991, a mere two years into its lifespan, shoegaze was all but dead. My Bloody Valentine's phenomenal effort Loveless had killed it, flayed the body, cremated the bones, scattered the ashes to the winds, built the coffin, put the final nails in, dug the six-foot hole, and buried it for what most thought would be for good. And that was MBV's second album. Knowing they had a snowball's chance in Hell of topping that masterpiece, the rest of the genre's banner-bearers abandoned it or disintegrated soon after - Lush went britpop, Slowdive went country, and Ride just got boring (naaaah just kidding Ride was always boring). A hodgepodge of lesser bands attempted a revival over the years, but they all sounded like a weak and milquetoast imitation of Slowdive's Souvlaki. And then, when all seemed lost for 'gazers, there was Skywave. 1999's Echodrone was just another juvenile imitation of those that had come before them, mostly consisting of simplistic lo-fi throwbacks to The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy with neither the sound nor the fury of those now-legendary Scottish brothers to be found. It seemed as though this Fredericksburg, Virginia-based trio would disappear amongst the bargain bin wreckage of failed 'gazers before them, but this was not to be their fate. Synthstatic came in 2004, and it was just what shoegaze needed. Skywave mixed the magnificent songwriting of classic goth rock and post-punk with the monstrous distortion and swirling guitars that had become the shoegaze standard, creating an album full of catchy pop tunes mixed in with enough fierce noise to keep them interesting to dark and tortured metal-craving souls like me. The New Order and Cure-styled hooks came courtesy of guitarist Paul Baker and drummer John Fedowitz, and the noise was from bassist Oliver Ackermann's custom pedal company, Death By Audio, featuring such products as "Supersonic Fuzz Gun," "Interstellar Overdriver," and "Total Sonic Annihilation." Paired together, these two elements were nothing short of unstoppable. You can call it a zombie resurrection or a Messianic return, but Synthstatic spearheaded a new wave of shoegaze revival that continues to this day. Skywave broke up amicably, and while Baker and Fedowitz stayed in Fredericksburg to continue refining their pop-craft in Ceremony, Ackermann relocated to Brooklyn and began to dive headfirst into terrible, awful, blistering, mind-warping, wonderful noise in his new outfit A Place To Bury Strangers (henceforth referred to as Strangers because no way am i typing all that out).

Strangers are the unofficial and self-proclaimed loudest band in New York, and they can certainly get away with saying that. Oliver brings in the Skywave strategy of sound-checking at half volume, then cranking everything up to ten once the actual performance starts. Bassist Jono MOFO (best surname ever) and human drum machine Jay Space are almost indistinguishable in style from the classic Joy Division rhythm section of Peter Hook and Stephen Morris (respectively) and provide a solid post-punky proto-dance grounding for Ackermann's sheets of decibel-topping nightmare chords. The best example of this is lead single "In Your Heart," the most accurate to date glimpse at what could have been if Ian Curtis were still alive and Joy Division had never turned into New Order. In between the infliction of grievous hearing damages on his audience, Oliver sings breakup- and hallucinogen-inspired lyrics with a resigned indifference worthy of Lou Reed, the undisputed king of not giving a fuck. All throughout, Ackermann keeps his eyes constantly on his pedal board, the real star of the show. The noises that he's able to hot-wire together are absolutely frightening things, and the guitar hasn't sounded this exciting since Loveless. I'd like to believe that instead of sending interested parties a catalog, Death By Audio probably just mails them a copy of Exploding Head. And it seems to be working, too; his pedal business caters to such supreme clientele as Nine Inch Nails, U2, Wilco, Elvis Costello, and Lightning Bolt. Death By Audio is also the name of the Williamsburg warehouse where he and Strangers live, work, practice, build crazy pedals, and sometimes rent the first floor out for gigs and art shows. With so much on his plate, it's impressive that Oliver's been able to record a full album, let alone one that's actually good.

The songs on Exploding Head are hardly complex. By Ackermann's own admission, most of the melodies are influenced by 50s girl groups, 60s bubblegum pop, and the ineffable Ramones. Some songs are just plain simplistic - "Deadbeat" sounds exactly like a riff I could swear I came up with in the fourth grade. But bands like the aforementioned Ramones and their legions of devotees have taught us ages ago that music doesn't need to be complicated to be good (neckbearded Dream Theater fanatics please take note!). The melodic simplicity of the songs serves as a foundation for the rest of the Death By Audio wizardry, an essential grounding for the panoply of intergalactic brain-frying guitar effects. Songs like "Everything Always Goes Wrong" are straight-up JAMC-circa-Psychocandy worship, but the replacement of glass-cutting feedback with the Death By Audio arsenal makes the songs a lot less derivative-sounding, and far more arresting. The formula does fall flat in a few places, notably on the tepid title track, paradoxically the least cranial-detonation-inducing of all on the album. Additionally, I liked the second album single "Keep Slipping Away" a lot more when The Cure did it back in '85. Other than these two exceptions, however, the album is astoundingly solid and a tremendous step forward for modern shoegaze, with tracks like "Ego Death" (working title: "Gimme Acid") bringing the genre that much closer to fist-pumping heavy metal noise. And that's what a lot of people have been neglecting in the twee-plagued indie scene of the last decade: rock music is supposed to be LOUD.

I was fortunate enough to catch Strangers last fall, when they were opening for shoegaze paragons Chapterhouse and stole the show straight out from under their noses. Their entire set was a deafening strobe-laden hour of blistering sonic mayhem, next to which the peaceful 'gaze of Chapterhouse seemed limp and uninspired. What absolutely sealed the deal was their closing performance of the cumbersomely-named "I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart," a thundering pop song that broke down into a steady stream of unsettling noise, as Oliver looked out from beneath his hair and made eye contact with every single member of the audience, right before the stage exploded. Once he and MOFO had had enough of the aural panic they had created, they began smashing their guitars and violently ripping the strings off the fretboards, swinging the wounded instruments around with a tight grip on their entrails as they swung the guitars into the walls and the audience looked on in a state of shock and trauma. No ears were spared. The studio treatment of Strangers' assault is a woefully inadequate substitute for their live show, but make no mistake: after listening to this record, you should probably have a mop on hand to get the brains off the wall.

BUY OR DIE.
<3 sam