Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 8
Label: Mute

How you come to feel about this album will probably depend on how you judge its first seven seconds. You'll either think it's a shameless pillaging of My Bloody Valentine and tear the thing to pieces in a fit of righteous fan-boy anger or maybe register it as a piece of loving sonic homage. Perhaps you'll have never listened to Kevin Shields' dream-pop demi-gods and will fall headlong with A Place To Bury Strangers, stunned that a guitar could make such marvellous sounds. Well, it's a safe bet that opener "It Is Nothing" is a referential nod of the head/bend of the tremolo arm in the direction of their influences, but it's a bold move of the band to map-out so clearly the dimensions of the indomitable shadow they're standing in.

The dangers associated with making such knowingly indebted music, coupled with a tendency towards the over-stylised and over-compressed certainly punched a few holes in their first effort in 2007. On album number two though they seem to have made a forthright effort to fill these in. By turning the dial down a little on the fuzz-laden intensity, Brooklyn's best acid shoegazers allow more of their songwriting (miles better this time round) to be heard and the result is an LP that sounds more like a neatly sculpted journey than a violent ball of noise.

Particularly good examples of where the listener benefits from such restraint include the rampant, drum machine-assisted "In Your Heart", the relatively chilled-out "Smile When You Smile" and stand-out cosmic-alterno racket "Keep Slipping Away". Here, APTBS switch between an uplifting guitar hook even Shields himself might be proud of and a funereal dirge, plastering each section with layers of dense, treated guitar, delay-rigged vocals and pounding drums in an attention to texture that permeates the whole album, finding a climax in its absolutely huge closer.

Lyrically the band continue their thematic preoccupation with head wounds and while words, you might say in keeping with the genre, tend to take a back seat to instrumental ingenuity, the songs fair better when they are not quite so rawk-literal as on "Deadbeat" ("What, what the f**k? / Don't play with my heart") and "Ego Death" (roughly, "Whoa! I did some acid / This is weird"). Sung with Oliver Ackermann's typically sunken, matte-finish vocals though, these tracks are ultimately very satisfying whatever the content. While A Place To Bury Strangers are obviously still in awe of the original shoegaze crowd, "Exploding Head" is a step towards sounding unique.

    by Edgar Smith