A few weeks ago I received an email from Mr. Brown asking, ‘have you heard of a band called A Place to Bury Strangers? I read they sound like a combination of Mind is a Terrible thing to taste-era Ministry and old My Bloody Valentine.
I was so intrigued at this description that I immediately went over to hype machine* and looked the band up. However I had trouble finding anything more than one song and then there was trouble with my internet so the streaming took forever, blah blah, yah yah.
I forgot about it. Not completely. No. One thing I’ve learned is that the old, ‘I walk into a record store and forget what I want to buy’ affliction has mutated into the ‘I can think of a million things a day to research on the internet but the second I sit down in front of the computer all I can do is go to facebook’. So at any given time during the days since that email a co-worker might’ve been telling me about the best mac and cheese they’ve ever had or a movie they’d recently seen and I would blurt out, “Oh! I need to check out A Place To Bury Strangers!’ and then sometimes that co-worker would not talk to me anymore, perhaps taking my unexplained tangent as a literal endeavor.
Anyway, while stuck in Chi town recently nursing a MAJOR sinus infection** I remembered. And this time not only did I remember the band but I remembered to jot myself a note.
Flash forward to yesterday. I found said note and immediately went about researching the group.
Wow.
First, go here and listen to the first track that comes up, should be ‘In Your Heart’.
http://hypem.com/#/search/a%20place%20to%20bury%20strangers/1/
Now, right off the bat I hear the Ministry and MBV, but I’ll be damned if I don’t also hear some old Bauhaus. The track ‘Dancing’ originally from ‘Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape’ – Daniel Ash has a technique for using the guitar’s harmonics almost like bells, and that’s exactly what I’m hearing right as ‘In Your Heart’ opens.
I’ve filtered around and listened to a few more tracks by A Place to Bury Strangers and they’re all killer, although as anyone who tracks stuff down on the internet first knows you don’t get a feel for the way the actual albums are arranged, and I’m thinking these guys are an album-oriented group, so it’s off to Amoeba one day real soon to scoop them up (I believe they only have two albums, one from this year and one from 2007) and if they’re as good as I think they’ll be you’ll probably hear me ranting about them again.
I love finding new music.
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* The self-appointed music blog ‘zeitgeist’ Hype Machine is really cool. It filters all (or at least most) of the MP3 blogs from around the world and you can stream stuff on it. Like an online itunes that has access to all the stuff you don’t have)
** When you live in California and come home to the Midwest and get sick a lot of people assume you have H1N1 and give you dirty looks.