Frontman Oliver Ackermann is one in a long line of noise obsessives, taking after The Jesus and Mary Chain and Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis in his devotion to the punishing, cathartic possibilities of the distortion pedal. His band’s live shows have, since their early days, become a kind of watermark of shoegaze, a noise threshold other bands will approach, and then dial back from. They never lost sight of song-writing though, and tracks such as ‘Another Step Away’ and ‘To Fix the Gash in Your Head’ seemed to bleed with all the despairing lovesickness of the very best Cure records.
It is not too surprising, then, that ‘Song for a Girl from Macedonia’, the opener to their newest compilation, 'Rare and Deadly', digs deeper into the gloom and the heartache. Taking up the motorik propulsion of their earlier work, the track removes just enough of the feedback squalls to expose the emotional core. Ackermann sings in his insistent monotone, his lyrics skeletal, but evocative: “Are you in my thought-steps, are you in my dreams? / Are you there beside me, are you where it seems?”. It extracts the inky-black, heavy-hearted despondency at the centre of their earliest songs, and amps that instead of the guitars. The result makes you wonder what might have happened if Billy Idol had been given access to just a few of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s pedal setups.
The screeds of sound remain, but have been rarefied, pushed into the periphery of the song as a faint wail. Sometimes, it comes through in bursts, moments of bracing noise made more satisfying for their scarcity. ‘Song for a Girl From Macedonia’ is actually one part of a clutch of newly-released material compiled from a ten-year period, over which APTBS seem to have been working towards a more brooding, menacing version of their sound, defined more by what is taken away than what is abrasively, overwhelmingly present. The melodies and basic structure are basically unchanged, but Ackermann has become more cunning in how and when he deploys effects, and the listening experience is richer for it.
Like the very best practitioners of the genre – My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Alcest – APTBS have understood that refining sound and refining song-craft often happen together. ‘Song for a Girl from Macedonia’ is as sweet and dark as any song they have written, but now with a softer edge to the sound, the emotions are more potent than ever.
Alex Bentley
Image: 'Rare and Deadly' Official Single Cover