Worship
There's a textural richness and emotional depth to the New York noise-rock trio's toned-down third album, elements that weren't always apparent on their previous collections. The best songs feel like the work of another band entirely.
Typecast as noisemongers since its explosive, self-titled full-length in 2007, New York’s A Place To Bury Strangers has spent the intervening years trying to find the perfect position of its volume knob. 2009’s Exploding Head folded more overt pop into its Jesus And Mary Chain fuzz and cool goth undertow; this year’s O…
There comes a point when things cease to be mere "loud music" and turn into incapacitating torrents of dense, scarcely comprehensible sound.
It’s admirable how blatantly the guys in A Place to Bury Strangers still wear their influences on their noise-soaked…
Onwards to the Wall, the EP A Place to Bury Strangers issued between this album and Exploding Head, suggested the band was headed in a harder-edged, more streamlined direction that felt all the more radical given their previous full-length's wind tunnel dream pop.
It's never pretty when good bands go off the boil but the drop off that A Place to Bury Strangers seem to have experienced since 2009's Exploding Head is particularly shocking. The band sound tired and uninspired for the duration, a feeling corroborated by Oliver Ackermann's lyrics and vocal delivery, both of which are even more tormented than usual ('either way I choose/the choice is wrong/so I choose wrong/always wrong').
The self-proclaimed loudest band in New York sure did run out of things to say by their third record. To be fair, Worship speaks through a tremendous instrumental palette, one that suits and occasionally upgrades the tradition of post-punk songscapes that