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A Place To Bury Strangers, "Transfixiation"
This Brooklyn trio’s fourth full-length almost did not happen, as the band was plagued by a host of tensions, false-starts, and creative second-guessing before everything eventually came together.  Ostensibly, Transfixiation is an attempt to translate Strangers' live intensity into their studio work in hopes of creating something more dangerous and unhinged, but their intensity has never exactly been in question for me: narrowness of focus might be a bit of problem, but lack of bad-assness definitely is not.  Transfixiation sounds more or less exactly like I would expect a new APTBS album to sound (like a darker, more pissed-off Jesus and Mary Chain), which is perfectly fine by me–they are what they are and they are very good at it.  All I hoped for was a few more great songs and Transfixiation did not fail me at all.
A Place To Bury Strangers have a well-deserved reputation for excess due to their ear-melting live volume and vocalist/guitarist Oliver Ackerman's impressive array of self-designed effects pedals (he runs Death By Audio).  However, not many people seem to notice that the trio have a similar gift for restraint as well, which is one of my favorite aspects of their sound.  On the opening "Supermaster," for example, the entire song is driven by Dion Lunadon's muscular, propulsive bass line and drummer Robi Gonzalez barely even touches his cymbals.  As far as I am concerned, it is a perfectly constructed piece: there is a great groove, excellent dynamic variation, masterful use of space, some killer bursts of warped guitar and it is all over in about 3 minutes.  Everything that is supposed to make an impact does exactly that, as there is literally nothing unnecessary that could have been carved away.
When they stick with that lean and hooky formula, as they do with the even better "Now It's Over," APTBS are a great band.  When they stray from that formula, however, things get a bit more complex.  Obviously, if they released an album with 9 largely interchangeable variations on a single theme, it would get tired very quickly.  Unfortunately, the divergences from that comfort zone can be a mixed bag.  A few of them work quite well, like the barreling, full-on garage rock chaos of "I'm So Clean" or the warped, woozy, and treble-heavy "Love High."  I also enjoyed the masterfully fucked and wrong-sounding pop of "What We Don't See" quite a bit.  The darker, more menacing "Deeper" is something of another stand-out, gradually escalating from deep subterranean bass drops and threatening pronouncements into some kind of post-industrial sex jam with guest vocals from Emilie Lium Vordal.
The enjoyment of the rest of the album, however, hinges mostly upon how much a given listener loves blown-out and mangled shoegaze guitars.  I myself like them quite a bit, but vastly prefer them when they are employed in the service of a great song.  "We've Come So Far," unfortunately, is basically just an excuse for a howling guitar blow-out, while the closing "I Will Die" is so fried and in-the-red that it is probably more treble sizzle than actual content.  That said, it is crazy to fault APTBS for failing to churn out a start-to-finish masterpiece given how brutally constrictive their chosen niche is: for a band four albums deep into their career, I would say that they have wrung a surprising amount of variety and excitement from a formula of deadpan, range-less vocals coupled with wild guitar eruptions.  Granted, it probably is not enough variety and excitement to actually carry an entire album, but I have always viewed APTBS as more of a singles band anyway and I cannot think of anyone else who is doing a better job at mining this particular territory.  Given that arguably half of Transfixiation consists of strong singles, it seems like as fine an album as any sane person could reasonably hope for.
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