A Place To Bury Strangers - Transfixiation
- Published in Albums
Having believed the reviews at the time I've never yet listened to A Place To Bury Strangers' Worship album, reckoned as it was to be a poor relation to the band's self-titled debut and 2009's Exploding Head. Transfixiation then is an opportunity to reacquaint myself with a band that certainly excited me eight years ago.
From the off Transfixiation is obviously not as punishing a record as the band's earlier two, a factor that may have informed those reviews of Worship. It would be grossly unfair to describe this as being a lack of something fundamental however. Opening track 'Supermaster' is a bit weedy in the middle but there are encouraging amounts of distortion by its end and 'Straight' immediately picks up the pace and injects enjoyable gobbets of guitar noise into the proceedings. The clear vocals and pop-punk drumming admittedly initially stand out as "not right" but only for as long as it takes to work out that there'd be no complaints if this was a previously unknown act.
The doominess evinced on the band's earlier albums seems therefore to have been replaced with a more wistful element - the later Cure rather than the fledgling JAMC. 'What We Don't See' and 'Deeper' rather undermine that assertion, being as they are two of the group's most homage-like offerings at the altar of the Reid brothers, but this in turn emphasizes the greater variety of material that the band are producing now.
'Lower Zone', as a further example of this, is a tortured guitar instrumental run through with motorik tom toms (which could safely in fact last rather longer than it's mere two and a half minutes). Whether anyone will reassess Worship off of the back of Transfixiation is up to them but having heard and enjoyed the latter I feel the need to check out the former. Seen in the light of where The Horrors started out and where they currently are sound-wise APTBS haven't travelled light years between album one and number four but there has been a maturing of sorts that may have been groping in the dark a couple of years ago but has surely now achieved the power of sight.