Show Review

A Place to Bury Strangers Date: September 20th 2007 Venue: Mercury Lounge (New York, NY) It’s not often that I witness something powerful enough to jar me out of my cool, detached pretensions and force itself into my face.  A Place to Bury Strangers did just that this past Thursday night.  This was not a concert to idly witness or take a passive, passing interest in.  This band makes music so loud and immediate that it forces the listener to pay attention – a beautiful, noisy and crushingly-loud musical slap in the face. By now, anyone even vaguely aware of A Place to Bury Strangers is well aware of their “loudest band in New York” moniker, and it’s certainly a well-deserved title.  However, this isn’t noise rock for the sake of noise.  It’s a meticulously-constructed web of noise and sound that wraps around frequently strong melodies and rhythms that a lesser band would lack.  It immediately becomes obvious that each and every sound was created and constructed with the methodical touch of someone obsessed with sound. While the vocals/lyrics sometime come off like an afterthought, a seemingly necessary, yet momentary distraction from the wonderful sound supporting it, this also seems to work perfectly in this instance.  Not just shoegaze for the sake of creating a “wall of sound”, literally every single track from this group manages to provide a completely new sound; not just from song-to-song, but largely from anything else currently being written, performed and/or recorded.  With this is in mind, the diaphanous vocals prove an asset: there’s nothing barring the listener from tumbling deep into this sound. On stage, there’s a welcome lack of personal presentation and overt showmanship present; none of which A Place to Bury Strangers needs.  You get some scratchy 8mm graphics playing about on stage, an occasional, blinding burst of strobe light and of course the music.  The LOUD music.  But not loud solely for loudness sake, but more that if it were any softer you might miss one of the who-knows-how-many layers of meticulous sound present. Taking the stage with not so much as a “hello” and departing the same way, this is a band solely interested in creating its unbelievable sound on stage and letting as little as possible interfere with that goal.  The performance from all three members, especially leadman Oliver Ackerman, isn’t an act.  It smacks of an artist committed to what they’re doing completely and totally; with an almost eerie sense of focus and obsession to the task at hand.  I felt more as if I was witnessing something being created in front of me, more than a band just playing some songs. Andrei Tarkovsky once said that “Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”  A Place to Bury Strangers seems to be somehow the sonic expression of this idea.  The music here is beautiful and moving, but not necessarily coming to you easily and softly.  Those willing to fight the noise and embrace the ear-drilling will be rewarded with something impressively rewarding: a truly one-of-a-kind band with a singular sound and genuinely moving songs. Best damn show I’ve seen in a long, long time. A Place to Bury Strangers Official MySpace More photos of the show can be seen here Author: Will Joines Photography: Will Joines [ Back to Shows Index ]