Shoegazing rockers A Place to Bury Strangers have a released a new video for “We’ve Come so Far” with plenty of crowd surfing shenanigans as they say goodbye to their home of almost a decade.
Stylistically, there aren’t too many tricks to what A Place to Bury Strangers want to show: we start with a behind the scenes look at the band, walking through a crowded corridor with fans and friends congratulating them. The band then walks on stage in the unbelievably small and intimate Death by Audio venue–the last show ever played there, we’re told by a subtitle. Rather than caging the animal, the confines of the venue put the beast right in your face, with almost no separation between performer and audience as they all feel the same waves of guitar and bass feedback pulsing through them. Speaking of waves, a couple daring audience members jump up for a little crowd surfing, looking like they’re having a blast.
The song itself borrows heavily from the Jesus & Mary Chain, with it’s reliance on guitar feedback, verse-chorus-verse structure and repetitive, hypnotic, sardonic lyrics. A couple of things save it from being a ripoff, though: 1) Where the J&MC relied almost solely on guitar hiss and feedback, A Place to Bury Strangers add generous gobs of industrial and circuit bending noises, and 2) While the drumming on classic J&MC cuts is typically lifted straight out of a Phil Spector wall of sound hit, APTBS sound like they’ve brought in John Bonham (or, at the very least, Lou Barlow) to beat up the drums like they owe him money. The result is propulsive, catchy and entirely devastating.
As hinted above, the video also celebrates the almost ten years of shows played at Death by Audio, which was co-founded by video director Matt Conboy and APTBS frontman Oliver Ackermann. Of the video and the venue, Conboy said in a press release:
The fact that we were loosing our home, that it was the last show and APTBS were playing seemed like too good of an opportunity to turn down. We filmed their set and I felt like we were able to capture the spirit of that moment: this weird, dark form of celebration and catharsis. By the end of the night I think everybody felt like they really got something out of their system.
“We’ve Come so Far” is off of A Place to Bury Stranger’s most recent album Transfixiation, which is out now on Dead Oceans. As follow up to 2012’s Worship, critics have been generally positive in response to Transfixiation‘s dichotomous blend of avant garde noise worship and ability to conjure memorable melodies.
The song is the second video to be released off the album, after the band put out a more cinematic video for “Straight.” This last video did a great job of visually translating many of the band’s aural themes, looking like an extraterrestrial transmission about Bigfoot and other cryptozoological legends.
If you’re in Austin, you can catch A Place to Bury Strangers at Red 7 on February 28th. Or you can do the next best thing by watching the live video of “We’ve Come so Far” below.
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