Album Review: Pinned by A Place to Bury Strangers

At 3:32 of Pinned's anthemic opening track, "Never Coming Back," a single guitar tone with the deceptive appearance of an army decimating any enemy within its radius of destruction ties A Place to Bury Strangers' past to its present. After four studio albums and numerous EPs, Pinned showcases A Place to Bury Strangers' latest, and most solid, iteration of a band that specializes in creating sonics that cut through the bone and straight to the marrow, sounding timely, relevant, and groundbreaking. Since the A Place to Bury Strangers released their brilliant self-titled debut album in 2007, and at the same time opened for the legacy industrial act Nine Inch Nails, the promise of greatness loomed large for the band, However, multiple line up changes interrupted the band's path toward sustained success.

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Oliver Ackermann is as much a facilitator as he is a frontman. Four albums and a fearsome live show have enshrined his band, A Place to Bury Strangers, as Brooklyn noise rock royalty, but he's also had a substantial impact on that city's DIY scene. Between founding the guitar effects company Death By Audio and operating a venue/work space out of its warehouse for seven years, Ackermann has helped countless bands find their sounds.   Unfortunately, he can't provide the same service on his own band's fifth album. Pinned finds A Place to ….

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Their melding of noise pop and shoegaze was so remarkable because they appeared to take the next step, injecting them with a ferocity that hadn't been done before. Pinned, the band's fifth full-length, shows them continuing to loosen their grip on what made their debut so memorable, trading their deafening tendencies for a sound that allows for more experimentation. Frontman Oliver Ackerman has referred to opening track "Never Coming Back" as a rumination on "those moments you could die, and what that means".

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