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Great Album -- If you like Joy Division and My Bloody Valentine, you should like this album. It is great! A Place To Bury Strangers = The Jesus & Mary Chain + Joy Division + The Cure'S First Four Albums + Bauhaus'S In The Flat Field -- To all the babies who pine for the Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine to reunite, I have one thing to say: move on. How can you whine when terrific artists such as Autolux, Liars and Voyager One exist? Now A Place to Bury Strangers, one of the purer, more nostalgic shoegaze outfits, competently picks up the discarded fuzzy, spaced-out, heavy pieces shattered by your heroes. The band cover its already gritty tinny-to-shrieking guitars, picked bass, post-punk-rhythm-spewing drum machines and reverb-soaked vocals with even more grit, volume (!) and otherwise raw production. The harmonies and solos are frugal yet meaningful, and the lyrics mysterious and hard to hear: in other words, it's the ultimate homage to the aforementioned legends. Unoriginality is rarely a pleasant compliment, but only because it never sounded this perfect! This One Goes To Eleven -- "I'll just wait until you turn around / kick your face in!" That lyric from this band's visceral track "To Fix the Gash in Your Head" pretty much sums up the sonic intentions of A Place To Bury Strangers. On their debut LP, they deliver ten sharp kicks to the cranium in static-laden doses of ear-shattering distortion, pulsing drum machine beats, and reverb-saturated baritone vocals. While they are certainly indebted to the shoegazers of yore (My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Catherine Wheel), their treble-soaked clatter and ominous, sometimes downright malevolent lyrics are equally informed by the goth-dance of New Order and Joy Division and the mechanized doom of late '80s industrial. Still, I've never heard an indie rock band indulge in the shrill high-end extremes of guitar hiss quite as liberally as these guys. Upon the first listen, it almost seems too much, as if they forgot to smooth out those nasty squealing overtones before they released this thing. But it doesn't take long to realize that these brittle, unnerving sonic qualities are the defining characteristics that give these songs their power and beauty. But hey - let's not over-analyze it any further. Let's just crank it up and forget our ear plugs! Heir To The Shoegazer Throne -- Within the first seconds of the album, I knew this is the band I've waiting for. The opening track, "Missing You," erupts with a quick, rhythmic fury. The brooding vocals are quickly lost in a sea of distortion and static. And this precedent established in the first track is maintained through the album. "Don't Think Lover" blends frantic guitar riffs reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine's "Isn't Anything" with the polish of The Jesus and Mary Chain's later work. Next is "Don't Fix The Gash In Your Head" fueled by a machine gun-esque electronic drum beat. The hissing and fuzz shooting through the background is done without any concern for the listener's ear drum. It's loud. It rocks. And most importantly, it's genuine. I still can't believe that this record was released in 2007. I won't go through a song-by-song review here, but the point is that this is the best shoegazer since "Loveless." A Place To Bury Strangers uses everything that was great about the genre and the result is stunning; an absolute must own for any My Bloody Valentine, Ride, The Jesus And Mary Chain, etc. fan. Binding : Music Download Genre : pop-music Release Date : 2007-09-11 Running Time : 0 seconds See also:
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