The members of A Place To Bury Strangers are connoisseurs of distortion. Much like an expert sommelier could likely tell you a wine’s region of origin, vintage, and aspects of terrior from a small sip, APTBS could probably hear a few seconds of fuzz through a speaker and explain to you the specific machinations of the dozens of transistors, resistors, and capacitors that brought forth such a specific palate of noise. Indeed, lead brain/axeman/vocalist Oliver Ackerman runs a boutique effects pedal company called Death By Audio that has built pedals for no less than The Edge and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine.

Ackerman’s deep carnal knowledge of stompbox sound manipulation has always come through heavily in APTBS’s music. No less so on Exploding Head than on their self-titled first release. It is positively brimming with superlative-worthy noise spanning the frequency spectrum. The album’s focus is transparently on creating massive guitar textures from densely-layered slabs of heavily manipulated and overdriven instruments (My Bloody Valentine being the most obvious referent here) as opposed to focus on melody or rhythmic complexity. These dudes are gonna collapse the bony and gooey mass between your headphones by sheer force of will, for sure, but you may not put Exploding Head back on the shelf humming their melodies or scrawl any of their lyrics in the margins of your trigonometry notebook.

So let us first sing the praises of the Immersive Distorted Environments (IDEs, for short) that APTBS create with such vigor and craftsmanship. Their songs are atmospheric, but not in the way that ambient music is atmospheric. Atmospheric in the sense that there is no way out of it, that you are utterly surrounded and engulfed by it. Examples abound, but for the sake of argument, let’s take the beginning of “Deadbeat.” It begins with a riff that might be called garage-y, before a guitar monolith comes crashing down and ravages everything in its wake, subsuming all into its IDE. The sounds are difficult to describe, since there are only so many ways to describe distortion before one begins to sound like a broken record (pun intended). But suffice it to say that Exploding Head contains every type of distortion you could imagine, as well as some you likely never would. It has the effect of making all elements of the song hierarchically equal (save for a couple of privileged bass or guitar moments on “Keep Slipping Away” and “Ego Death”), since distortion takes no prisoners and distorts indiscriminately. But APTBS is usually competent enough to finagle this technique into causing the elements to sound like more than the sum of their parts.

However, it’s not like this has never been done before. Read any press on APTBS and you will hear the same couple of bands mentioned: My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain, et. al. And with good reason. Exploding Head’s lead off track, “It Is Nothing,” does sound uncannily like a sped-up version of Loveless’s lead off track, “Only Shallow.” And APTBS uses that now-practically-archaic reverb-laden machine-gun-lockstep-tempo acoustic-drums-trying-to-sound-like-a-drum-machine sound on many of the tracks. The first two have got it written all over em’, but by track three, “Lost Feeling,” they’re dispensed with. The break is welcome.

To address another of the non-six-stringed elements, the vocals are often lost in the mire of distortion that makes the record so powerful. This works to the band’s advantage when Ackerman’s voice smoothly integrates into the controlled cacophony, but if you’re listening for lyrics, forget it. It’s like trying to have a conversation on a factory floor. From what I could get, though, it didn’t really seem like we’d be missing anything. From “Deadbeat:” “I said what/ What the fuck/ Don’t play with my heart.” Or “I Lived My Life to Stand in the Shadows of Your Heart:” “You make my dreams complete and then crash them down.” I’ll stick with the noise.

On Exploding Head APTBS do guitar noise quite unlike anyone else that immediately comes to mind, despite their obvious roots. But to become a great band, rather than just a good one, they’ll have to extend their focus a little further outside the realm of nasty guitar textures. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, of course. But connoisseurship can turn to maniacal myopia if given half a chance, and it’d be a shame to see a band like A Place to Bury Strangers fall short.