About halfway through Exploding Head you really start to forget why A Place to Bury Strangers sounded so exciting on their self-titled debut two years ago. Not exactly what one wants to hear when talking about an anticipated sophomore release, especially one with a title that promises to literally split your fucking wig, or at very least serve as an alternate soundtrack to Scanners (I'm guessing Melting Face was a little too on-the-nose). While Exploding Head is no washout-- right around "Keep Slipping Away", the back half picks up where the debut left off, full of inspired pieces of paranoia-inducing industrial guitar noise and moribund pop textures-- it too often seems like a misguided attempt to connect dots for the listener. On the debut, much of the fun came from sifting through all that ball-retracting dissonance and coming out with handfuls of melodic goop. Here, after eliminating some of the harsher textures in favor of cleanlier, well-positioned rawk tunes, the music is packed with palatable songs that spook instead of uncomfortable ones that seriously unnerve. In other words, if we're still classifying A Place to Bury Strangers as Jesus and Mary Chain revivalists, it's far too early in their career for this to be their Automatic.
Head is most assuredly a maturation, from the songwriting right down to the fancy effects-pedal driven magic that frontman Oliver Ackermann is so rightfully lauded for (Ackermann famously crafts customized pedals through his Death By Audio company for artists like TV On the Radio and U2, but has apparently saved some of the coolest tricks for his own band). The band sounds tight, the production full and perfectly drab. So maybe it might seem like a dick move to criticize this record for giving a fuck, but when that white-hot feral intensity only rears its head ever-so-often, the unsubtle influences that anchor Exploding Head (JAMC, My Bloody Valentine, Echo & the Bunnymen) often render songs pancake-flat. For example, on first listen, older stuff like the irrepressibly exciting "To Fix the Gash in Your Head" sounded like little more than Wall•E being crammed into a garbage disposal to the tune of "Upside Down", and still managed to be frighteningly arresting. Where here, new single "In Your Heart" doesn't offer much more than a very impressive facsimile of some of Ian McCullough and Co.'s darker imaginings, well-shaped and completely forgettable.
The technical stuff on the record is pretty solid through and through, the band always retaining a much-appreciated limberness even on wishy-washy cuts like "Lost Feeling". So when big standouts like "Ego Death" (rife with ripping guitars and Nick Cave worshipping sneer) and "Everything Always Goes Wrong" (a mean and moody sock-hop jam that contains some of biggest and best pedal work on the album), Head seems like a perfect follow-up, tidier but still as fierce. Yet it's genre-nursed stuff like the noodly post-punk of "Exploding Head" or the too cleverly rationed rising power-chord chugs of "It Is Nothing" that seem to best represent how quickly that fierceness can dissolve when song structures are laid this plain (albeit still kinda groovy). It soon becomes obvious how important that wall of coronary-clutching noise was, and how painfully rewarding it was to break through it. Head just doesn't put up much of a fight in that respect, revealing it's secrets too fast and too loose. It's more than a little greedy, but by the end of Exploding Head, you can't help but feel a little disappointed to be stuck with a bucket of cleaning products and no viscera to scrape off the walls.
