Worship the office building

A Place To Bury Strangers: Worship Review


Album: Worship
Band: A Place To Bury Strangers
Genre: Noise-rock/Post-punk Revival


6.8/10


Every night before he goes to bed Oliver Ackermann (guitarist/singer/songwriter for A Place to Bury Strangers) kneels down and says his prayers to Joy Division’s late great Ian Curtis.  “Help me express my angst using the medium of post-punk and noise.  Help me to sing in a droning moan that evokes absolute despair in all who hear it.  In Shoegaze’s name I pray, Amen.”  The third release from the noise-rockin’ Nine Inch Nail’s openin’ modern shoegaze act A Place to Bury Strangers is aptly named Worship because their music is the ultimate tribute to bands like New Order, Joy Division, and My Bloody Valentine.  Newcomers to this band will hear this record and think it noisy, haunting, and brooding, but in actuality this is the band’s tamest release by far.

     That’s not to say that there aren’t crazy noises still infecting these songs.  Ackermann’s near encyclopedic knowledge of guitar effects still shines through on every track, but this LP as a whole takes a step back, perhaps to assess the future of the band’s sound, the name of their last release was Exploding Head for chrissakes.  Songs like “Mind Control”, “Revenge”, and “Leaving Tomorrow’ still burst with glorious squeals and echoes.  “Revenge” pounds the skull.  I found myself tapping fast eight notes along with the bass drum, rejoicing in the noise.  But the other tracks actually have atmospheric qualities, with the guitar toned down, the bursts of sound more controlled.  The track “Fear” has the guitar drop out completely, with echoes jumping in and out as the bass plays a precise line.  “Dissolved” leans closer to dreampop than to noise rock.  The track goes silent around the 3:30 mark and what sounds like an entirely new song begins, with a CLEAN tone.  It reminded me of the last album I reviewed, Oshin.  It matches the song’s name however; the song dissolves into nothing before coming back in completely new.

       A new sonic direction can have it’s drawbacks, though.  With the restrained tone from the instruments, Ackermann’s vocals are more pronounced, and it yields very mixed results.  His Ian Curtis-style monotone is a cool effect during verses and is an awesome texture with certain noisy songs, but on this record the vocals seem more lazy than brooding.  On certain songs I don’t really detect the emotion portrayed through the instruments and lyrics.  On “Why Can’t I Cry Anymore” his vocals are just short of spoken, and the answer becomes clear, it’s because he’s become a robot, and robots can’t cry.  On “Slide” Ackermann attempts to hit notes on the top of his range, not unsuccessfully, but weirdly.

    Then there are the lyrics, it may not sound like it, but this is almost a breakup album, with songs like “Alone”, “You Are the One”, “Fear”, “Dissolved”, and “Revenge” all blatantly griping about lost love.  Most of these lyrics are fine, but that’s just it, they’re fine.  With the vocals more pronounced than ever, I hoped that I would find some quotable lines, but I just found a lot of sadness expressed very clearly.   “Slide” contains a line that I think stands out because it defies the hopelessness of the rest of the album: “Ever since I was a little boy/I had a lust to live/I wouldn’t be so insecure/Except there’s oxygen.”

      It’s very song-to-song for me.  There are great cuts like “Mind Control”, “Fear”, and “Leaving Tomorrow”, and there’s head-scratchers like ‘Why Can’t I Cry Anymore” and “Alone”.  This album may or may not be worth a download or purchase, depending on how big of a fan you are, and I would recommend listening to their debut LP before listening to this, but there’s definitely some cool stuff going on here.  I'll give it 6.8 strangers buried out of 10.

FAVE TRACKS: Mind Control, Fear, Leaving Tomorrow