A Place To Bury Strangers — “Half Awake” — Breathe EP
If Oliver Ackermann is doing what I think he’s doing here—making his guitar sound like soul-sucking bagpipes—then he’s an even shrewder mad scientist than I thought. The hearing in my left ear will never what it was before I saw A Place To Bury Strangers live last year, thanks to Ackermann’s custom-designed Death By Audio line of sound manipulators, but all the distortion in the world couldn’t bury the elegiac beauty of this Scotch instrumental. Regardless, they pull it off with more restraint than is customary, giving the track not so much a beginning/middle/end as a steady swell/fade, like the rise and fall of a sleeping person’s ribs. Or the sickening lurches you feel in yourself at the edge of a gray bluff, zoning out into the Channel’s fog.
