A Place To Bury Strangers: Louder Than The Rest

A Place to Bury Strangers performed a deafening set at the Gibson Showroom during the CMJ Music Festival.

Doron Gild

It's hard to believe that the guitar noise of A Place to Bury Strangers comes from just three people. At the Gibson Showroom in New York City, the band ran through a quick sound check and delivered by far the loudest set KEXP recorded during the CMJ Music Festival.

Underneath the bombastic sounds of Oliver Ackerman's homemade effects pedals, A Place to Bury Strangers writes honest-to-goodness pop songs in the vein of New Order and The Jesus and Mary Chain. The band both celebrates and subverts its danceable rock with layers upon layers of My Bloody Valentine-style white noise, without sounding anything like their influences.

Closing A Place to Bury Strangers' set with "Ocean," Jay Space pummels the drums with a white-hot fury. It's a perfect set-up for the set's final two minutes: a torrid squall of guitar destruction that made KEXP's John Richards exclaim, "Man, it's times like that I wish I could swear on the radio."