In November of last year, A Place to Bury Strangers released "So Far Away", the first taste from Onwards to the Wall, the follow-up EP to their 2009 sophomore album, Exploding Head. As a song, "So Far Away" carried a lot of the same hallmarks of the material that had immediately preceded it, but unlike the screeching, industrial-minded manic power that defined much of their terrifically visceral self-titled debut, it's a groomed, economic kind of song that rounds-off all of the dangerous, splintered ends. More notable was the video that accompanied the track, a sort of "flipbook" montage of frontman Oliver Ackermann's own personal Hipstamatic photos, stitched together to create a stop-motion-animation effect, except with real live people and settings. Like rifling through the iPhone of a very busy and well-traveled guy, it's actually a unique, voyeuristic peek into the progression of a person's year, complete with amorous cavorting, gigging, and passenger-side window boredom, all set in some pretty stunning locales. But it should be said that, aside from containing plenty of APTBS-related snaps thrown in the mix, it's not a video that feels terribly representative of Ackermann's band. After a half-decade, A Place to Bury Strangers aren't an act that's allowed their music to do much moving around, and when they have, they've let moodier tendencies prevail. In other words, if the "Stay Away" video had solely been a document of APTBS's progression, it wouldn't have been nearly as engaging.
Onward to the Wall opens with "I Lost You", and while it remains firmly in the band's wheelhouse, it feels indicative of the APTBS that lives in the mind: A pummeling onslaught of of banshee-wail guitar stacked on top of a chugging motorik bass riff, plus some gnarly, rancid feedback. In essence, it's a no-prisoners take that, while nothing new, is welcomingly jarring. It is by far the best of the five tracks offered here, a return-to-form that seems to take the more calculated moves on Exploding Head and re-routes them back in the right direction. Unfortunately, the rest of Onward to the Wall takes even fewer chances than Exploding Head did. The reality begins to set in that, try as they might, this is a band resigned to making "mature" post-punk tunes instead of tapping into its live-wire essence. Because when the title track shares more in common with an old She Wants Revenge cut than the slow-lane Dum Dum Girls cut it secretly wants to be, well, we got a problem. In essence, if there's anything to be learned from this EP, it's that the majority of APTBS's career can be chalked up to playing it safe. Which, for a lot of us, is wildly disheartening.
It isn't to say there aren't some great little moments tucked in here and there. "Nothing Will Surprise Me" brings in bracing cat-in-heat guitar moans over a hardcore backbeat, plus there's the aforementioned "I Lost You". But it means we're left with three other tracks that are characterless at best. I've never been too big a fan of Ackermann's goth-y, dead-eyed delivery, but it seems here as if the music is using his vocals as something of a guiding light. It amounts to a mostly homogenous, toothless EP that seems to be aiming for a greater appeal, but ends up appealing very little.
Perhaps the most problematic thing about Onward to the Wall is its timing. As the profile of New York City bands making dangerous, abrasive, and loud music becomes increasingly elevated, you can't help but yearn for the APTBS of five years ago. It would've been great to see them help supplement a bill along with the ranks of pig-fuck revivalists, black metal revisionists, and nü-noiseniks. Here, they sound disconnected from what made them so visceral and captivating in the first place, as if they're almost scared to go back. Instead, they've resigned to making more color-by-numbers post punk that uses too many grays and not enough pure blacks, and as time goes on, it feels as if their paint brush water is being incrementally diluted by half.
