Bands that stubbornly stick with successful formulas can be forgiven if their songs are strong. A critical dud on arrival may experience new life as a reappraised gem down the road. It’s a story familiar to bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain, who masked tightly written pop gems with aggro noise and lazy personae.
That band is a clear influence on Brooklyn trio A Place to Bury Strangers, whose fourth LP is lazy through and through despite throwing up waves of explosive sex-and-death rock and roll. On 2012’s Worship, main man Oliver Ackermann sculpted APTBS’ thrilling, overdriven aesthetic into more varied pop songs. Transfixiation abandons that direction for the back-to-basics thrashing we’ve come to expect, but minus the curveballs and impressive sonics that kept its predecessor interesting.
When the band does switch up the mood, however slightly, the results misfire. Opener Supermaster pairs overwrought self-reflection with an under-wrought bass line, and Deeper’s simplistic rhymes and lurching aimlessness undermine its strip-club potential. The flickering What We Don’t See and We’ve Come So Far are Transfixiation’s best instances of hookiness-meets-noisiness.
Top track: We’ve Come So Far
