A Place To Bury Strangers – I Need You
Genre: Shoegaze, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
Deep Purple and Motorhead may have prided themselves at being, at one point in time, the loudest rock groups in the world. As hard-rocking as those bands were, their work embraced, largely, the typical format of rock, rarely straying away from it. It is often a mixture of ear-bleeding discomfort and soft rock trajectories.
As years have passed and the world’s got more threatening, simply deliver music descendent from Little Richard is not enough. Scaring the audience through theatrics has all been done before. The next logical step forward is to take the feedback of the guitars and turn it into something of a shipwreck re-enacted night after night on stage.
The Motorhead of shoegaze is, certainly A Place To Bury Strangers. Like their predecessors, Jesus and Mary Chain or Lou Reed, they take their love of pretty melodies mangled through aggressive use of guitars very seriously.
I Need You finds the group no less settled into the world. The guitars growl like some kind of soundtrack to a disaster while the vocals hum over it as if a lounge singer had wandered into the studio by mistake. It’s all part of the never-ending saga of bands trying to out-darken the Velvet Underground, and it seems to be working out well for A Place to Bury Stranger.
Mad Meg – Functioning Adult
Genre: Punk, Post-Punk, Art Rock
Y’know, the thing about rock that I really like is that it’s dumb. It’s like a dirty joke that you don’t have to screw your brains much to understand. It’s like a recipe that anyone can master without burning down their kitchens. And, try as people might, there’s no way to improve upon a formula that someone stumbled upon more than seven decades ago.
It makes even very smart people pretend to be dumb, and the dumb people think that they’re on to something tremendously worldly and polished. Lou Reed did this better than anyone and check out the brain on that guy. The Velvet Underground’s first album is a mix of one-chord rockers presented with the seriousness of a high-brow art exhibition. People like myself are still writing to praise the record.
It takes a lot of rockin’ street smarts to act this dumb as Mad Meg understand. Functioning Adult sounds like the kind of cheap noise that only people that have bought thousands of dollars worth of equipment over the years can come with. It’s teenage rock n’ roll about refusing to grow up.
