Album Review: A Place To Bury Strangers by A Place to Bury Strangers

Oliver Ackermann runs Death by Audio, a Brooklyn-based company manufacturing hand-wired guitar effects pedals, which explains how his band can make a Richter-scale racket that has seen them described as "the loudest band in New York". As a frontman, deep in hock to Ian Curtis and Jim Reid, he is less distinctive, which is why the trio's debut works best when it is heaviest - on the helicoptering industrial beats of To Fix the Gash in Your Head, or the obliterating climax of Ocean. In Ackermann's hands, distortion is no mere plastered-on effect but an instrument of ferocious eloquence.

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