WebliminalBlog

images from show in Chicago, March 2010

“I felt like they got on stage and flipped a switch and poured it out onto us, and that is just what I love about music at times. It is the total clearing of my head that occurs when someone else’s emotional density streams through it.”

Oliver Ackermann is the lead singer and guitar master. Like he did at Siren Festival, he swings his guitar around and sometimes plays it while he throws it around in midair.

What struck me most about APTBS was the way their sound glistened and sparkled, filling up the big space, while still being littered with psychedelic nuance and microcosmic subtlety.

fish-eye multiple-exposure photos

As far as immediate, red-hot rock songs go, A Place to Bury Strangers is among the best bands out there. Hell, Exploding Head could have been a punk record if it weren’t for their shoegaze affiliations and songs like “I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart.”

“Now, whereas Les Paul’s initiative might be considered audacious because of what it meant to first amplify sound like this, what Ackermann does goes one step further. It’s subversive and dissociative, aesthetically, because of what it means to do what he does to the sound. He does not merely amplify the frequency emitted by the pluck of a string; he bends, tweaks, scrambles and destroys it. He makes noise; neither its melodic potential nor its tonal qualities are very apparent. As a result, he is forever in conversation with the culture of subversion that Les Paul’s audacity helped foster.”

“I’m pretty jaded with most ‘new’ bands, but Brooklyn’s A Place To Bury Strangers have grabbed my attention with two excellent albums and a fuzzed out noise fest of a live show that outdoes the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and, to be honest, most of the first wave of shoegazers “