Exploding Head

The “summer-beach-pop” discourse has been built up and proliferated with such force recently that it may take a while for most of us to realize how inexcusable it was to allow seasonal language to overshadow the caliber of the music itself. But when the sun says goodbye to the once-bright sky and the ice returns to haunt our hearts and turn our sidewalks into fucked-up, slippery, sloshed-out messes, the sounds of summer will, just like summer itself, fade away like all sunny-ephemera does. There will be frostburn and snot-icicles where there was once sunburn and sand-snot. There’s no way to prevent it. The winter-gloom shall return, and a mass exodus to California has already once proven to be nothing more than a quick stop on the way to yuppiedom. We can either spill tears into our Miami Vice beach towels, or we can face the frost and say, “Bring it on, motherfucker!” Henry Kissinger once said, “Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.” The discourse of summer-pop, like all flimsy structures, will one day be knocked to the ground in order to make room for new ones. “It ought to happen now,” says Kissinger.

About halfway through Exploding Head you really start to forget why A Place to Bury Strangers sounded so exciting on their self-titled debut two years ago. Not exactly what one wants to hear when talking about an anticipated sophomore release, especially one with a title that promises to literally split your fucking wig, or at very least serve as an alternate soundtrack to Scanners (I'm guessing Melting Face was a little t oo on-the-nose). While Exploding Head is no washout-- right around "Keep Slipping Away", the back half picks up where the debut left off, full of inspired pieces of paranoia-inducing industrial guitar noise and moribund pop textures-- it too often seems like a misguided attempt to connect dots for the listener. On the debut, much of the fun came from sifting through all that ball-retracting dissonance and coming out with handfuls of melodic goop. Here, after eliminating some of the harsher textures in favor of cleanlier, well-positioned rawk tunes, the music is packed with palatable songs that spook instead of uncomfortable ones that seriously unnerve. In other words, if we're still classifying A Place to Bury Strangers as Jesus and Mary Chain revivalists, it's far too early in their career for this to be their Automatic.