A Place To Bury Strangers
Synthesizer
Dedstrange
A Place to Bury Strangers’ (APTBS) seventh full-length album, Synthesizer, is giving the opportunity to buy the synthesizer that founding and lead member Oliver Ackerman built specifically for this recording. Is it gimmicky? Yes, but in a way that those who have discovered APTBS’s noisy, psychedelic, space shoegaze rock will be enamored by, anyway. The extra-deluxe version of Synthesizer comes with a bag of transistors, wires, and parts, and a diagram to solder together a usable, playable version of the instrument! How fucking cool is that? It’s not fully surprising, as Ackerman’s other business is the Brooklyn-based boutique effects pedal company Death By Audio, which was founded as a warehouse space for artists and musicians but also functioned as a recording studio, factory, and venue. I like this guy’s ambition and vision.
I stumbled into APTBS with their 2018 Pinned album. Specifically, opening track and first single “Never Coming Back.” Its gothy, chunky, woody bass lines and percussion drew me in. Thin, reed-like harmonies from drummer and vocalist Lia Simone Braswell are hauntingly beautiful. The wall of feedback from Ackerman’s guitar sucks me fully into their specific abyss. The band’s lineup has changed quite a few times since their 2007 New York inception, but it’s Ackerman’s love of distorted noise over the top of pop-adjacent melodies that is the through-line. The music APTBS creates is so deeply within my happy place that I started following every release, digging into their back catalog with glee!
A Place To Bury Strangers is a busy, busy band! The number of re-mixes that they are involved with and the pace of newly released, original material is refreshing in the era of long-gestated works from bands that have been around for the same 16 years. It means (at least to me) that they enjoy the music they are creating! And this is apparent throughout Synthesizer’s 10 tracks. Experimental post-punk by moniker alone allows a certain latitude in composition, but tracks are kept tight and on-course. Short, distortion-drenched bursts, like opening track “Disgust,” segue into more subdued electro-heavy (one may even say pretty?) songs, such as “Fear of Transformation” and “You Got Me.” I like every facet of APTBS’s soundscape, but when they decide to write a love song, it’s yearning and beautiful. “Plastic Future,” with its closed high-hat tattoo rhythms, reminds of Pinned and Worship in ways that I was beginning to wonder if they would ever explore again.
Lyrically, Ackerman is exploring the angst of this modern world. How often we humans are out of sync with everything that’s happening around us. How isolating that can be to a soul. He does provide glimmers of hope in “You Got Me.”
“All at once my heart collapsed I shriveled up I fear I might not be enough / They laughed at us, you flicked them off, I realized I like you more than I like myself / If I awake let’s take the car let’s hit the beach let’s lose our minds and lose our bodies / In a world where the universe is crashing down and there’s no hope I feel ok.”
This is (and has always been) the stock in trade of post-punk. A safe place for the outcasts to feel all right, because there’s at least one more out there approaching their mortal coil with the same awkwardness. That’s the solace of music and art, to have a shared experience and feel a bit more connected.
Synthesizer releases today, October 4, 2024, on Dedstrange records in all versions. Do yourself the favor and give it a listen whether you’re new to A Place To Bury Strangers or excited for new music from the band. If you’re like me, there will be a moment (or many!) that captures your imagination, and you’ll keep going back to their well. It’s a blanket of noise to keep you warm this autumn! ◼
