A Place To Bury Strangers – Hologram EP

There’s that nature documentary, where the scientists are struggling along a muddy riverbank in Siberia. Suddenly, one of them stops and points excitedly at what looks like a pile of muddy, rotting garbage. What on earth can have got them all worked up? It’s just a pile of shite, no? Fast forward a couple of days and what has been revealed is the carcass of a mammoth. And there’s a raw and terrible beauty to what has emerged from the tangle of detritus.

The Hologram EP from New York ‘Post-Punk legends’ A Place To Bury Strangers is that mammoth. On first listen, it’s a jumble of lo-fi sonic clutter that makes little sense. And then as you stop hearing these five songs and start listening, the underlying glory begins to emerge.

This EP is determinedly unsettling and idiosyncratic in execution. The production is nightmarish and reverberant in places, off-key jangling guitars and a downplayed vocal sometimes struggles to find its place in the mix amongst the riot of discord (In My Hive), and then that darkness is subverted. Playing The Part is an almost breezy motorik pop tune with strong nods to The Church‘s melodic psychedelia. End Of The Night returns to that echoing wall of noise, a kind of nightmarish Phil Spector treatment. Opening track I Need You is an mid-tempo opus where a distractingly busy bass underlies a swirling dreamscape in which the guitars howl in the background and through which a downbeat and low-key vocal meanders and is eventually swallowed up. I Might Have, with its joint super-dry and jaunty super-fuzzed guitar riffing recalls the darker edges of Britpop. Even this, however, is undermined by a growing undercurrent of apocalyptic sonic clutter.

Three stars only because the band made me work hard for their appreciation, in a world where instant gratification has become an uncomfortable norm. Well worth persevering with and definitely recommended.

The Hologram EP is out now on Dedstrange.