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A Place To Bury Strangers was pretty much ripped from the New York clubs and placed on the national stage thanks to Pitchfork's decision to follow the band's every move back in 2008 based on the merits of their impressive debut. The modest success that followed (headlining tours, opening slots for Nine Inch Nails and signing to larger indie label Mute) hasn't changed the band's core sound all that much, as evidenced by their second album, Exploding Head. The production is a little cleaner than their debut but they're still largely defining their sound by the amount of guitar-pedal induced noise they can conjure up. This approach works well on the album's early tracks like opener "It Is Nothing", which is appropriately wild and careening and "Lost Feeling" with its post-punk tribal drums; but they have a much weaker batch of songs this time out. Even "I've Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart", an older song re-recorded here, sounds far less effective than before. The Jesus and Mary Chain is obviously their largest influence (try to find a review that doesn't mention this) but what they fail to realize is that, for every great song in the band's catalog that the Reid Brothers bathed in ripping feedback there was also another great song that showed off the actual song-craft lurking beneath the layers of noise. On Exploding Head these guys don't appear to be writing songs on the same level, preferring to let the noise do all the talking and leaving the melodies and vocals as an after-thought. If all they wanted to do is make enough ear-shattering noise to bore its way through your skull, then they've accomplished their goal. If they were looking to do something more (and I hope they were) then they need to try a little harder next time out.
DAVID MANSDORF
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