A Place To Bury Strangers at the Larimer Lounge
For all the talk about the loudness of A Place To Bury Strangers' live show, the band's performance last Friday, Oct. 23, proved this to be more myth than reality. APTBS was loud, but not in a peel-the-paint-off-the-walls kind of way—where the Brooklyn band triumphed was in the amount of sound it produced. Vocalist and guitarist Oliver Ackerman's handmade array of stomp boxes propelled the band’s shoegaze guitar tones, enveloping the audience with a combination of heavy intonations and well-written lyrics. With the house lights dimmed, abstract projections illuminated the room, and a fog machine placed front and center was set it to full-steam. By the third song, darkness and clouds had wiped out nearly all visual cues, and APTBS was left playing strictly for the audience's ears.
"Ego Death" transformed from a mildly aggravated shoegaze number on the band’s latest release, Exploding Head, into a foreboding, post-gothic number, thanks to Jay Mofo's steadfast bass work and Ackerman's aloof vocals. Exploding Head's grandiose final track, "I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart," became more ambitious live as Ackerman matched epic melodies with raw, garage band power. Set closer "Ocean" popped as a strobe light unexpectedly lit up the stage, illuminating only the excessive amounts of fog as the trio crashed through a full-on noise jam.
It was one hell of a way to end a set, or rather, it would have been, if APTBS had reigned in its noise improvisations within a pleasant six-minute mark. Instead, the trio let the sound linger too long—the strobe went from shocking to irritating and the feedback jams from visceral to exhausting. But what other way could a band whose live set is built on excess be expected to end a set, other than through the use of volume, pedals, and fog? A Place To Bury Strangers came to overwhelm Denver, and it did so in fine form, even with a slow death close to an otherwise great show.
