The first time I heard My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loveless’, I thought the record was warped or it was perhaps a mispressing. Obviously, I would soon realise that, no, it’s supposed to sound like that.
A Place to Bury Strangers have been mining that seam of brain-melting psychedelic shoegaze indie with everything amped up to the max and then run through more amps also cranked to the max to create the ultimate overload. Soaking up the splintering feeback and white-noise wall of treble of The Jesus and Mary Chain, along with nods to The Cure along the way, they’ve forged a career out of assimilating their influences with a clear sincerity and enthusiasm, while at the same time fucking with them through sheer volume and noise.
Their more recent releases have been their most daring and different: whereas ‘Worship’ pushed that extreme treble jolt to the max, ‘Transfixiation’ went all-out on the fucked-up psychedelia and lo-fi racket, with some songs sounding like half-worked demos recorded on a Walkman where the tape had stretched. 2018’s ‘Pinned’ was perhaps their most ‘pop’ album, which also most obviously appropriated from The Cure.
If ‘End of the Night’, the lead single from the upcoming ‘Hologram’ EP is in any way representative, they’re making a return to that twisted MBV-style shoegaze of their early years, but as informed by the experimentalism of ‘Transfixiation’. One can’t help but wonder if the start of the video, which sees Oliver Ackermann tinkling on a keyboard and creating some spacious, Cure-esque synth sounds before John Fedowitz smashes the keyboard in two, wielding his bass like an axe as Ackermann takes up his guitar is perhaps symbolic. With Sandra Fedowitz’s powerhouse drumming bashing away relentlessly, everything else around it is a blur of noise that leaves you feeling giddy. And it’s a most welcome return.
