A Place To Bury Strangers live – July 10th, 2011 La Maroquinerie, Paris

by Matthew Mowatt

The intimately constructed stage area at the Maroquinerie was perhaps one of the best venues in Paris to have your face melted by A Place To Bury Strangers.

Toybloid, the high-energy female trio, with one drummer dude nestled comfortably behind them, were the perfect opening act to jostle the thoughts of the lethargic crowd of Sunday Parisians from going to work the next day.

Then there was smoke, black jeans, leather and the sonic wave of frontman Oliver Ackermann’s guitar ripping through the room, as APTBS opened up with ‘In Your Heart’. Standing there drenched in a flood of electric brine, heads exploding all around me, I thought about the force of an atomic bomb dropped on the Amazonian jungle and how it was possible for three guys from New York to create a musical carnage which made it feel so good to be torn apart.

As they entered into the surfer-tsunami of ‘Deadbeat’, through the smoke and strobe lights I caught glimpses of Ackermann wrestling the demons out of his guitar, throwing it and thrashing it about, only for it to be possessed once again. The projector displayed crowds of people, their gaze fixed and their faces revealing the bizarre sensation of witnessing something terrible yet beautiful at the same time.

During his Niagara Falls crash into ‘Ego Death’, bass player, Dion Lunadon, took a step off the stage, to do what appeared to be a sort of knights dubbing of a hip fan wearing a Jesus & Mary Chain leather jacket (a group noted for its undeniable influence on APTBS’ wall of sound), before disappearing into the shadow and smoke.

the faithful began to jitter and twitch with the animal-like pleasure of being connected to something deep within.

With the dry ice fog clearing, the mood shifted and the black and whites transformed into a smooth candy rainbow throughout the Maroquinerie. Ackermann then introduced what I would call their ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, the appropriately named ‘Keep Slipping Away’. Moving in and out of post-punk rhythms put through layered caves upon caves of echo, it was here that the faithful began to jitter and twitch with the animal-like pleasure of being connected to something deep within.

The hypnotic gunshots triggered by drummer, Jay Spaceman, kept the fans alert for long enough to hold them out of the doledrums until the last half of the set. ‘Another Step Away’ was followed by a rather lengthy version of ‘I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart’, which flooded the room with enough distortion to challenge even the most hardened noise fan.

Spaceman then built the vibrations up to a palpable level, while Ackermann stuck his head out through the smoke, resembling the living dead with his eyes glazed over in the warm spotlight, and looked back at us with a direct, almost hostile stare, as if to comment on the obstinate reaction from the crowd.

Once the ear-shattering finale of ‘Ocean’ had subsided, the band left us melted in the flickering light and smoke feeling as though we had just experienced a night terror or a scream from the subconscious. On realizing that APTBS weren’t coming back for an encore there was a meek boo tossed languidly from a person in the audience but in spite of a couple of persons having seizures on the floor, the crowd didn’t really seem up to it. As for myself – I think that getting a hot blast from a sonic ray gun for over an hour is a healthy dose; moving beyond this point is only reserved for those who truly deserve it.

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