I’m just going to lead with this:  I adore the new A Place to Bury Strangers album, Exploding Head.

I usually try not to read other online reviews, for fear that they might subtly alter my own opinion.  In this case, I was so keen on Exploding Head that I knew it wouldn’t matter, and my curiosity got the better of me.   As it so happens, Pitchfork reviewed both Exploding Head and The Black Heart Procession’s Six this week, and while I mostly loathed Six, everyone’s favorite “leading voice in independent music” rated the two releases pretty similarly.  Dusted also gave Exploding Head a decidedly mixed review, for whatever that’s worth.

As best I can decipher it, the complaint of both the above seems to be that APTBS has cleaned up its sound, scrubbing out wall of noise from its sophomore full length.  While I don’t see this as inherently a problem (and really, it’s only a “clean” production by shitgaze standards), those who are looking to place blame here find themselves pointing fingers at new label Mute, or on the band itself (for manufacturing previously-unseen pop sensibilities).  I simply don’t see that very much has changed.  It’s true: this album is fantastically, astoundingly hooky.  It’s a propulsive, clanking, semi-industrial dance album in the spitting image of Joy Division, and I think this infuriates every reviewer who thought they had another easy “this apes my beloved My Bloody Valentine” review on their hands (for similar annoyance, see also The Raveonettes).  But the response makes me think of the fantastic Replacements album title: Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was.  To me, APTBS are less Dirty On Purpose, more Blank Dogs and Crystal Stilts.  They were always hooky.  And they blow these other ersatz Joy Divisions out of the water.

So this sounds like a formula for satisfaction, but is it cynical, VHS Or Beta stuff we’re dealing with?  Not at all.  Exploding Head joins the most recent Woods full-length and the Fergus & Geronimo singles as my early front runners for album of the year.  This may be gloomy music, but it would take a real grump to deny these hooks, or to wish they were covered over by white noise, or somehow shoegaze uninformed by the history of shoegaze music (in the ridiculous language of Dusted).  Anyway, in a nutshell, have you see the Ian Curtis biopic, Control?  There’s a scene there where the band finally starts getting real tight, and the various instruments kick in, ne by one,over the course of a song intro.  Everything’s firing on all cylinders, slowly building in intensity, when the actor portraying Ian Curtis gives in to the beat and goes bersek, booming out lyrics and spazzing, dancing in place with flailing arms.  The incredibly surge of adrenalin you can’t help but feel at that moment?  This entire album is a distillation of that feeling.  It’s great.

Only one problem.  Several of Exploding Head’s best tracks (Lost Feeling, Slipping Away, and Smile When You Smile, among others) are too large for wordpress to accept my upload request.  I really like In Your Heart, fortunately, which just sneaks in under our size limit, and which is below.   If anyone has a solution to this filesize problem (which has been an issue more and more as MP3 fidelity increases) please send it my way!

–guten MORGAN

• In Your HeartIn Your Heart