New York fuzz-rock pedal-mashers A Place To Bury Strangers have a new EP called Onwards To The Wall coming out next week, and we’ve already posted their fun flipbook of a video for “So Far Away.” Below, that EP is streaming in full.

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A novel idea for the new A Place To Bury Strangers video — it’s a flipbook of Instagrams! “So Far Away” is off their new EP, Onwards To The Wall, out later this month. Check out its video below.

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When we posted Vivian Girls’ cover of “John, I’m Only Dancing,” I mentioned it was part of the 2-disc We Were So Turned On: A Tribute To David Bowie, a compilation that also includes MGMT, Chairlift, Rainbow Arabia, and enough other people to necessitate two CDs (including Duran Duran). You’ll get a better sense of the diversity after checking out these takes on DB: We have the premieres of Warpaint’s airy “Ashes To Ashes” and Lewis & Clarke dusky, piano-manned “Changes.” There’s also A Place To Bury Strangers’ noisier, more menacing “Suffragette City.” Nico Turner’s psychedelic Ziggy Stardust cover art establishes a different mood.

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Disconnect From Desire is one of our most anticipated of 2010, and what Ben Curtis described in their Progress Report, as well as first taste “Babelonia” has made it more anticipated. “Windstorm,” sounds like it’ll be the first single from the album (the band’s Twitter says they’re currently shooting a video for it). “Windstorm”‘s an appropriate title: sisters Claudia and Alejandra Deheza’s background harmonies (or, really, it could be synths processed to sound like vocals. or the other way around) sound like wind whipping / whistling around you. This remix from A Place To Bury Strangers keeps the harmonies, and add a hammering drum track. It doesn’t sound as shoegaze-y as the original, but keeps the disembodied eeriness.

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APTBS projection artist Spencer Bewley directed this video for “Ego Death,” which has a heavy early-90s vibe to it, or, it just feels that way because we were just talking about Stone Temple Pilots (but watch their “Plush” video and decide). The clip’s strobe effects and spins make a nice juxtaposition to vocalist Oliver Ackermann’s slow-burning sneer.

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Screens were featured prominently in the video for A Place To Bury Strangers’ ear-exploding Exploding Head track “In Your Heart,” and the motif carries over into the Brendan Bellomo & Greg Wilson directed clip for “Keep Slipping Away.” Then they were obscuring the band in a bout of shadowplay; here Oliver Ackermann’s trapped in static and captured in a TV set hurled out the window by a lady who’s metaphorically doing the same to their relationship. There are glimpses of Oliver hard at work in his Death By Audio guitar pedal factory — where those Factory Records-ready effects are conceived — submerging himself so deeply in art trying to capture the beauty of his woman that he loses sight of the real thing. The ballad of a workaholic. The final scene is a television containing an image of the couple in happier times, hitting the sidewalk for a literal take on the album’s title. Poetry in explosion.

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Volume-knob maximalists A Place To Bury Strangers are on the road supporting their Exploding Head LP. Friday night’s stop took them to the Echoplex in Los Angeles with openers All The Saints and local psych fuzz rockers Darker My Love. Andew Youssef battled strobe lights and hearing damage (with the A Place To Bury Strangers branded earplugs, of course) to bring back this set of shots.

Brooklyn volume-knob maximalists A Place To Bury Strangers unleashed “In Your Heart” this summer as a primer to their appropriately billed Exploding Head LP. The two titles work in concert to locate the thrust of this track, and its video: the surging, Joy divided forward motion paired with grainy band clips, smoked sets, and shadowplay is resoundingly bleak (and hella loud), but it’s all tempered with luscious, high-def swirls of dye, suggesting it’s not just your cranium they’re trying to detonate. Because, you lie.

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There’s no denying “It Is Nothing,” the opening shoe-gaze anthem on A Place To Bury Stranger’s sophomore album Exploding Head, is a massive nod to My Bloody Valentine: From the title’s echo of Isn’t Anything to the swirl of overdriven guitars, the Brooklyn trio offers up a tight homage to Kevin Shields & Co. before shifting into the darker, bleaker direction of “In Your Heart.” It’s a great, somehow moving transition. There a bunch of these moments across the 10 tracks: For this and other reasons the album really needs to be heard in its entirety. (And on good, loud speakers: Oliver Ackermann takes the name of his Death By Audio effects pedals and this Exploding Head title seriously.) For now, listen to “In Your Heart” with it’s clanging Joy Division forward motion. We can all fill in the blanks later.

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By Amrit Singh & Brandon Stosuy
Our trek into Indio went so smoothly this year that we’ve both become paranoid about something going incredibly wrong at any moment, but so far we’ve made it through without broken bones or spirits. In fact, even though the day started with extreme lines and heat, once we passed the impressively green grass into the actual grounds and started watching bands (and people), the weather seemed to ease up incrementally: By the time we witnessed Paul McCartney nail classic after classic, we were freezing and felt vindicated by our decision to wear jeans. But there was much music before that.

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