My friend David has always referred to my taste in music as “foot in the grave,” and he’s persisted to call it that for years even after I renounced most things goth. It’s pretty funny, actually, because through the 2000s there have been a number of bands—Death Cab for Cutie, the Dismemberment Plan, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, the Rapture, the Killers, the Knife, etc.—that nominally seem to lend credence to his theory, even though there’s nothing technically goth about any of them.
In fact, when Brainwashed started to champion A Place to Bury Strangers over the course of the year, I successfully disregarded what they had to say. Though the site has really grown in recent years to accommodate many other kinds of alternative music, I still equate them first and foremost with 4AD and Soleilmoon and World Serpent. Subsequently, I imagined that the band must be three guys from New York barely out of high school with Robert Smith hair, playing pop songs about Helena, Lucretia, and Charlotte to girls with yarn dreads.
Yet eventually APTBS became inescapable. The painful slabs of feedback on “Missing You” and the familiar churn-and-hurl guitar dynamics that separate the verses of “Don’t Think Lover” are pure Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, respectively. But whereas every other band that summons these influences ends up sounding like a knock-off trying to cater to a built-in audience, APTBS is actually building on their accomplishments. Where the Reid Brothers would have smothered their songs with noise, APTBS use the noise strategically to heighten the dramatic impact of their brilliantly palatable songwriting. Where Kevin Shields would have twiddled a knob to obscure a song’s clarity, Strangers’ mainman Oliver Ackermann actually customizes effects pedals for a living. In other words, for many of these songs, the sounds came first.
A Place to Bury Strangers is the only record in my collection that requires me to turn down the volume on my iPod in order to listen to it.
The album chugs along from strength to strength, all the while stewed in a sumptuous darkness. Is it goth? Not exactly. But the guitar drone that dominates my favorite track, “The Falling Sun,” will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever gone to a darkwave club night. Let’s just call it “foot in the grave.”
For your undead pleasure: “I Know I’ll See You.” Get a load of the bassline in all its Gallup-ish glory.
No comments:
Post a Comment