A Place to Bury Strangers

Enemies of silence

By MARTÍN CABALLERO

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When you hear a name like A Place To Bury Strangers, and hear that they call themselves the "loudest band in New York City," its natural to entertain visions of some kind of brutal metal or some anamorphic avant-noise. But you might also be forgetting that "shoegaze" once meant a sonic experience somewhat akin to standing in front of a jet engine playing sad pop songs. New York City trio A Place To Bury Strangers fires up that engine again, with sounds like echoes of glass shattering at the bottom of a canyon, howls from primordial beasts, terrifying industrial accidents-among other things-all coming together in service of these menacing yet oddly catchy songs.

Guitarist/singer Oliver Ackermann also happens to be the mastermind behind the boutique effects pedal company, Death By Audio, so it's only natural that his band goes through the electronic wringer to conjure up some hairy sounds nobody's even thought of, and the two feed inseparably off each other. "Sometimes I'll tinker with something and think, wow, I never knew there could be a sound like that, and those sounds inspire you to write a song," he explains. Other times, necessity is the mother of invention. "When you have no money, you spend time on figuring out how to make the tools you need with what you have. I definitely broke plenty of amps and guitars trying to figure it all out, but you read books and you learn, and it gets you to where you need to be."

Last year, when they played NEMO, they finally found a patron in the form of Brainwashed.com's Jon Whitney. "He talked to us and then he wrote on a napkin that he'd love to release a CD," Ackermann explains. A self-titled CD emerged, a compilation of 3 years worth of CD-R releases and demos that is as confident a debut as you're likely to hear this year. Now they've been working on taking their head-splitting live show around the country, backed by some pretty monumental praise from music blogs and sites big and small. While the release was intended to be a limited-run, the sudden explosion of interest has resulted in sales far eclipsing the original plan. "We wanted it to just be this low-key thing. Jon really worked it so well. In the end, we just did it because we wanted to save ourselves time from burning CD-Rs all the time!" he laughs.

A Place to Bury Strangers with The Black Angels, Spindrift

Thursday, 11/8

Middle East Upstairs

472 Mass. Ave., Cambridge

617.492.9181

9pm/18+/$12

mideastclub.com

aplacetoburystrangers.com