In a 2010 review of The Big Lebowski, film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the Coen brothers’ cult comedy was “about an attitude, not a story.” Brooklyn noise rock trio A Place to Bury Strangers can be counted among a growing number of New York bands with a similar approach to music. Just as Lebowski used its farcical plot as a scaffold for character and wit, so A Place to Bury Strangers uses songwriting as a pedestal for a certain historical flavor of cool. Album after album, the band has reinstated the same compositional logics: simple post-punk basslines; driving industrial drums; violent, brooding lyrics; and squalls and squalls of noise. They are historical actors reanimating the New York of Suicide and Sonic Youth, luxuriating in memories of a cheap, scrappy city years after CBGB’s was priced out of the neighborhood.
APTBS’s fifth album, Pinned, at least folds in a few new elements to the band’s sound. It’s their first release with drummer Lia Braswell, formerly of Le Butcherettes, behind the kit, and her secondary role as a backup singer means it’s also their first release with a second voice chiming in across most tracks. Braswell makes a good foil to frontman Oliver Ackermann’s unflappable deadpan. Her light, airy delivery offsets his pained tenor, which always sounds sung through several rows of gritted teeth. Pinned also indulges more flexible vocal melodies than much of APTBS’s output; Braswell and Ackermann’s voices lilt upward over an endlessly droning two-chord progression on “Never Coming Back,” they dovetail charmingly on “Frustrated Operator,” and they crinkle vulnerably atop a reverb-heavy Cure bassline on “Situations Changes.”
Pinned reels in some of APTBS’s famous noise, but it doesn’t budge Ackermann from his station as a long-standing rock’n’roll archivist. The band’s discography to date could be boxed up and sold as A History of Alternative Rock in 50 Basslines—it’s that faithful to its myriad but period-specific sources. To the uninitiated, an album like Pinned probably makes a good primer, a gateway drug into a rich history of wiry bands melting people’s eardrums out of their skulls. To listeners with very little eardrum left to melt, it can feel reiterative: entertaining not because it’s never happened before, only because it’s happening now.
Though a competent quilter of established rock gestures, Ackermann has never really gotten the hang of penning lyrics to go on top of them. It is easy to sing with disaffection; harder to write words that actually sound good in the sheath of an uncaring drawl. “Never Coming Back” works because it’s chock full of vaguely dispirited phrases, like “I drift so low” and “I get so high,” that are easy to ignore in favor of riding the overall groove. “Too Tough to Kill,” with the couplet “Kill more dumb shit/Build more life forms,” sprays like masculinized bluster, and “Frustrated Operator” loses footing with the hypnagogic sequence, “Out to get us/Manipulate us/Hot potato/Operator.” “Brain flesh” (“Was It Electric”) sounds like a phrase a zombie in Wayfarers on a motorcycle might utter and I hope I never have to hear it again.
A Place to Bury Strangers could do what they do indefinitely, which is great news for concertgoers who love to be walloped in the ribcage with the output of a dozen bespoke guitar pedals. It will probably always be fun to see this band live, just as it’s always fun to see a great character actor put on a show even when there’s no plot and no dialogue to speak of. APTBS songs become about poise and a pose. For them, it seems, that’s enough.
