CityLife

A Place To Bury Strangers

ON their MySpace, A Place to Bury Strangers claim to provide ‘total sonic annihilation’, which may seem like an idle boast.

That is, until you see them live and realise that mere words can barely do justice to the assault of noise subjected on an unwitting audience.

The Ruby Lounge is perhaps the loudest venue in Manchester anyway; put ‘New York’s loudest band’ in the building and you can only imagine the deafening noise levels that led to your writer still nursing sore ears the next day.

Theirs isn’t so much white noise as nightmare rock, a volcanic eruption that couldn’t be any less bothered with melody and tune, rather creating a din that threatens to turn the venue into rubble.

Spectre

The spectre of The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine looms large over proceedings, but even at their noisiest those bands could still exhume an all-encompassing beauty; for A Place to Bury Strangers, such sentiments are lost in an explosion of relentlessly dark psychedelic racket and a haze of dry ice.

Considering there are only three of them, it is quite an achievement.

Wreckage

As for the songs themselves, those with some kind of discernable tune tend to fare better than those without, and amidst the wreckage there are a few chinks of light such as I Know I’ll See You, which isn’t quite as loud as the others.

However, there are times everything descends in to dirge, and at these moments it is no exaggeration to say that grown men were cowering at the sheer power of it all, hands over ears hoping for some sort of salvation. 

To say they are not for everyone would be some understatement.

More than that, they should come packed with a warning; listening to A Place to Bury Strangers, though occasionally thrilling, can be dangerous for your health.

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