A Place To Bury Strangers - Post-punk nu-gazers

History runs in cycles in music, and even more so in the new millennium. As the guru of global music journalism Simon Reynolds has analyzed on multiple occasions, we're living through a historical period marked by a tendency towards "retromania," an almost obsessive emulation of phenomena from the past. After the successful copy-paste revival of new wave sounds (think of what Interpol or Editors did), the 2000s also brought the neo-noise/shoegaze movement into the spotlight, with three New York guys among its protagonists, who caught everyone's attention thanks to the massive wall of sound and noise that defines their music.

Oliver Ackermann is the mastermind behind the trio, handling vocals and guitar, and not just that: he's also the creator of the effects pedals the band uses, which he even sells commercially through his company Death By Audio, whose client list over the years has included names like U2, Wilco and Nine Inch Nails. Rounding out the original line-up of A Place To Bury Strangers - the name Oliver chose for the project - are Jono Mofo on bass and Jay Space on drums.

The band started messing around in a bedroom back in 2001, but it wasn't until 2006 that they finally put out their first tracks, with the three EPs Breathe, Missing You and Never Going Down. The trio built their sound around a kind of organized chaos, relying heavily on feedback, drones and sheer volume, to the point where, after a string of particularly noisy performances on the US East Coast, they earned the nickname "loudest band in New York City" - something that started to spark real curiosity among industry insiders and everyday fans of alternative music alike, amplified by the media buzz generated by bloggers and specialist sites.

By 2007 their self-titled debut album was ready, released on Killer Pimp. The band tries to retrace the same filthy, grimy, noisy paths already walked by their main points of reference: Jesus And Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. They've got plenty of (decadent) character to spare, even if at times (see "Another Step Away" or "Breathe") they evoke the atmospheres of those very same masters so blatantly that it borders on embarrassing. A Place To Bury Strangers captures a band that already has solid foundations on which to graft stylistic references ranging from the lobotomized Suicide-style rock'n'roll of "I Know I'll See You" to the dark ceremonial feel of Sisters Of Mercy, right up to "The Falling Sun," which comes across as intense in its feedback explosions, the new-age atmosphere of its keyboards, and Ackermann's apocalyptic incantations.

But the dark, noise-oriented references and attitudes don't end there: "To Fix The Gash In Your Head" is a devastating slab of electro-punk that wouldn't be out of place on one of Primal Scream's best records, while the closing "Ocean" harbors the ghosts of Joy Division and Cure within it. The band searches for the perfect balance between nods to the past (new wave, noise, shoegaze) and an eye on the present, as clearly outlined on the opening "Missing You," a futurist bacchanal of caressing ferocity. But "Don't Think Lover" also holds unpredictable surprises: it opens with a distinctly heavy guitar riffs, before the track transforms into a hazy, romantic ride. Whether on nerve-wracked compositions like "She Dies," where Ackermann's killer distortions reach their noisiest peak, or on lightning-fast episodes ("My Weakness"), the New York band is at its best, hinting at enormous potential live as well. The ten tracks share immediately recognizable common threads: nervous physicality, white noise, perversely dreamlike atmospheres, a taste for eighties quotation - yet there's a clear attempt to rework those models into something personal.

The hype starts building, and the trio gets to indulge in quite a few treats, opening important shows for Brian Jonestown Massacre, Jesus & Mary Chain, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Nine Inch Nails. Where the band comes from also plays no small part in spreading their name: A Place To Bury Strangers are from New York, and their sound, even though it's built on dark-wave and psych-shoegaze tropes (with distinctly British traits), is steeped in those drastic, extreme urban moods that the Big Apple's rock tradition is so rich in examples of. Their taste for supersonic devastation, bludgeoning rhythms and noise-driven minimalism proves a worthy continuation of an aesthetic that, starting with Velvet Underground and passing through the no-wave movement, Sonic Youth, post-punk and industrial, arrives at the contemporary Liars, managing to fuse two different "ways of making noise": the British one, anemic and melodic, and the American one, rotten and torn apart.

In June 2008 their track "To Fix A Gash In Your Head" was chosen to open Lights In The Sky: Over North America 2008 Tour Sampler, a free promotional EP for Nine Inch Nails' 2008 tour, which also featured contributions from NIN themselves, Deerhunter, Crystal Castles and Does It Offend You, Yeah?.

The trio played numerous festivals around the world, and in 2009 signed with Mute Records, through whom they released the second chapter of their career that October: Exploding Head, the definitive record for shoegazers of the new millennium, one that brilliantly updates the sonic blueprints of "Psychocandy" and "Loveless," monuments that shaped at least one generation of musicians.

Exploding Head is a blast of energy with no weak points, a ferociously effective wall of sound. "In Your Heart" (chosen as the promotional single) hits with the force of a freight train slamming into a wall at full speed, "Lost Feeling" boasts a bassline that wouldn't have been out of place in the most corrosive moments of Sonic Youth and Nirvana, and "It Is Nothing" is an explosive opener, a pure distillation of My Bloody Valentine + Jesus & Mary Chain (or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, to put it in terms younger listeners will grasp) capable of reawakening taste buds dulled by years of flat indie-snob fare.

But the whole album is a triumph of fuzz, a cascade of devastating drones that never, however, smother the vocals or the other instruments. When needed, eighties-wave melodies emerge, as in "Keep Slipping Away" and the title track, digestible even for less extreme palates. The hypnotic "Ego Death," with its stripped-down percussion and the almost grating noisiness of the guitars, acts as the connecting thread with the debut album, which offered a more uncompromising sonic approach. This subtle pursuit of greater accessibility doesn't undermine a record that consistently maintains extremely high standards, stretching between the epic surges of "Smile When You Smile," the Joy Division-style gothicism of "Everything Always Goes Wrong," and the invasive distortions that accompany the closing "I Lived My Life To Stand In the Shadow Of Your Heart." Restless and noisy, raw and visceral, powerful and experimental, with Exploding Head A Place To Bury Strangers deliver a cornerstone of 2000s underground rock.

The album received glowing reviews across the board, and the band became an absolute reference point for every young musician looking to make their mark on the lo-fi noise/shoegaze scene. Despite the huge prospects looming on the horizon, bassist Jono Mofo decided to leave the band for personal reasons in the spring of 2010: he would be replaced by Dion Lunadon.

At the start of 2012, the first release credited to the new line-up was the EP Onwards To The Wall, an excuse to keep the market busy while waiting for the release of the fateful third album, which wouldn't be too long in coming.

In early summer, on the Dead Oceans label, came Worship, which confirmed all the great qualities of the American outfit, focusing even more on eighties wave-derived sounds. The element of surprise is lost, but the sense of wonder doesn't entirely vanish, thanks to the multitude of sounds the band pours onto the listener from the very first notes. After the opening triptych of "Alone"/"You Are The One"/"Mind Control", which unequivocally sets the record's climax, A Place To Bury Strangers spend the middle part of the tracklist chasing striking effects by working on structure: the imperious title track has the twist of a double restart, "Fear" opens with a minute of feedback before veering into unexpected developments close to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and "Dissolved" is two songs in one, where an enveloping first half gives way to typically electro-wave rhythms.

The proto-punk of "Why I Can't Cry Anymore" paves the way for the record's one true sonic assault, unleashed within the coils of "Revenge". To soften the mood, there follow the catchier "And I'm Up" and "Slide", the album's only moment of calm, before "Leaving Tomorrow" delivers the record's last adrenaline rush. Worship consolidates the band's international fame, with the merit of managing to steer them away from the risk of excessive, uncompromising noise delirium. Drowning white noise in something related yet different is the formula that allows the group to carve out a distinct personality of its own.

For Record Store Day 2013, Ackermann and co. released Strange Moon, an EP containing covers of a few Dead Moon songs, reworked according to their own aesthetic.

Early 2015 saw the release of Transfixiation, which consolidates the noise/shoegaze sound shot through with wave that has by now become the trademark of A Place To Bury Strangers. The mood is well established right from the opening "Supermaster", where the obsessive bass and minimal drums pave the way for guitar intrusions and Oliver Ackermann's increasingly commanding voice. The sonic deluges that follow can be rhythmically explosive ("Straight", "I'm So Clean"), and the vocals are at times almost buried, blurred beneath layers of guitars, as happens in the brief, intense "Love High", conceived in keeping with the typical aesthetic of My Bloody Valentine. Fits of distorted sound (the dark "Deeper") and percussion with a vaguely tribal flavor (the instrumental "Lower Zone") are regularly set ablaze by avalanches of distortion and delay.

The tendency here is to come across as deeply garage ("We've Come So Far" and "Fill The Void" could easily have fit on one of the early Black Rebel Motorcycle Club records) and, even more often, strongly post-punk ("Now It's Over" is Wire to the bone). Even so, the band shows great versatility, expressed through songwriting that can move briskly ("What We Don't See" is even catchy), but can also surprise with the pacing of the closing "I Will Die", an example of how a song can be literally corroded by sound. There are no weak moments or cheap winks here: Transfixiation, which marks Robi Gonzalez's debut on drums, is a tight, confident work, derivative yet highly personal at the same time, through which the New York trio consolidates its international reputation, confirming its main asset, namely the ability to wed unruly noise experimentation with an innate sense of melody, distilling it all into song form. Distortion and feedback continue to infect backing tracks that are sometimes synthetic, over which they often aren't afraid to swap analog sounds for a drum machine. After four albums and several hundred shows around the globe, A Place To Bury Strangers continue to teach new generations how to condense noise and wave into an (alt)-pop song.

Between dates on the 2015 tour, a number of sessions were recorded, later collected on the EP Kicking Out The Jams, distributed from March 2016 at the band's merch table after shows and, from April 8th, through the group's official website.

April 13, 2018 saw the release of Pinned: twelve tracks ranging from the crescendos of "Never Coming Back" — where white noise turns into an avalanche — to the dark-tinged gallop of "Situation Changes", all the way to the electro textures woven into "I Know I've Done Bad Things". The added value this time lies in the female backing vocals delivered by new drummer Lia Simone Braswell, evident in "There's Only One Of Us" (which opens like an '80s Cure track) or in the vocal interplay of "Too Tough To Kill". The American outfit wallows in darkness and sonic anarchy, but Oliver Ackermann and co. also know how to build melodies — crooked, disturbed, corroded as they may be — that still manage to burst forcefully out of the ordered chaos on "Was It Electric".

But it's always the coils of wave that take over, direct and majestic (see the opening of "Execution", a track duly swept by sudden gusts of white noise), confirming just how close Joy Division and My Bloody Valentine have never been before. Even when a danceable rhythm is grafted in, the mood stays dark and melancholic, steeped in nihilism and desolation, but compared to the uncompromising excursions of the past, today (and I don't read this as a flaw) there's greater attention paid to sounds that can somehow be digested even by those less accustomed to the more abrasive end of shoegaze. Effective when they go for concision (the convincing one-two of "Frustrated Operator" / "Look Me In The Eye", dispatched within three minutes) and when they crank up the BPMs ("Act Your Age"), APTBS never grow tiresome even when they stretch out the running time, thanks also to their usual bag of assorted noise tricks. Pinned thus proves to be yet another act of force and courage from one of the most "bright" (quotation marks required in their case) — and, by now we can say it, one of the most long-lived — outfits on the new millennium's noise scene.

2020 opens with the departures of both longtime bassist Dion Lunadon and new drummer Lia Braswell. Oliver is thus left alone at the helm of the project, and, with live activity impossible due to lockdowns and the pandemic, he decides to release, via the band's Bandcamp page and the main streaming platforms, Rare Meat, a retrospective that had already been circulating in (self-produced) cassette form since 2017, sold at the merch table during shows, now ensuring it a much wider reach. The subtitle says it all: demos and rarities recorded in the years from 2003 to 2017, including alternate versions of songs already released in different form, alongside tracks that never found a place on the albums released so far.

The band's noise side is of course well represented, right from the opening notes of the initial "I Walk Away", decidedly disorienting, with those killer guitars and a voice that seems to rise up from underground. But due space is also given to their more melodic side, as in the pleasantly narcotized version of "Sunbeam", and to their defining wave roots, highlighted by the inclusion of tracks like "Easy Life" and "For Frederik". Things get even more fun with the lethal urban skirmishes set off by the killer one-two of "Anna Rise" / "Raise", marked by feedback and cascades of sound typical of the nu-gaze aesthetic. The set closes with the programmatic statement "It's A Fast Driving Rave Up A Place To Bury Strangers", which in one stroke defines both the trio's name and its stylistic coordinates.

In 2021 further major lineup changes took place. The entire rhythm section was replaced, and Ackermann welcomed in married couple John and Sandra Fedowitz (formerly of Ceremony East Coast). Oliver and John have a shared history: both played, early in their respective careers, in the nu-gaze band Skywave. The first work released by this new trio is Hologram, an EP released in mid-July 2021, the very first release for their newly founded label, Dedstrange. Hologram contains five tracks in which the powerful, heavily effected guitar sound alternates with moments where the usual leaden atmospheres mixed with white noise thin out, letting more melodic passages shine through.

If the wave majesty of "End Of The Night" (the band's new instant classic) lays out the full lesson learned from My Bloody Valentine, a certain pursuit of cleanliness emerges in "Playing The Part", with guitar arpeggios that aren't afraid to reveal the influence of the Cure. The organized chaos of "I Might Have", with its killer riffs repeated ad libitum, is the track closest to APTBS tradition, a ball of sound at times indecipherable but always dangerously effective. "In My Hive" has a cybernetic rhythm, and shows just how well the newcomers can keep pace with the rich range of ideas expressed by Ackermann. Counterbalancing all this sonic power are the far more "ethereal" textures of the closing "I Need You", in which an ocean of effects is nonetheless always lurking around the corner, ready to suck everything into its own vortex.

Having crossed the finish line of fifteen years of activity, with five albums under its belt and a long string of EPs, Oliver Ackermann's band has secured itself a privileged position, proving capable of defining a personal mix of noise-rock, nu-gaze, wave, and psychedelia. Fans of hi-fi and overly polished sounds need not apply.

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