A Place To Bury Strangers >> You make my dreams complete and then crash them down

A Place To Bury Strangers - "I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart"

(Self-released, ca. 2006; Mute Records, 2009)

The band first put this song on a self-released CD-R EP, recorded in 2005 or 2006, and then re-recorded it for their album Exploding Head on venerable Mute Records.

Original 2006 version:

2009 re-recording:

The re-recorded version is over a minute longer and has much clearer vocals, sacrificing little of the feral intensity of the original version, so I think most people will favor it.
As I've seen some other astute fans point out, this song is heavily indebted to both of the songs ("Beach Song" and "Take Me Down") that comprise Slowdive's 1992 flexi 7".  (Yes, Slowdive used to rock pretty hard for a brief while.)  And it even brazenly has the lyric "I want to take you down," and they also have a song called "Missing You" which is not a cover of Slowdive's song "Missing You."  If you want to hear the lyrics very clearly, go listen to the synth-y Broken Spindles remix on the "I Lived My Life..." remix single (Mute Records, 2010), which has the vocals mixed up high and has most of the pesky guitars removed.  There's also a nice choppy industrial remix on there by Secret Machines.

Front cover of 2006 EP

Back cover or inner booklet of 2006 EP

2010 remix maxi-single cover art

I've seen APTBS perform this song live twice, in Oct. 2008 in Baton Rouge at Chelsea's Café and in Sept. 2009 in New Orleans at One Eyed Jacks.  They are known for doing an extended noise bridge during the middle of the song (starting at the 2:20 mark), like My Bloody Valentine infamously do during the middle of "You Made Me Realise," and believe me, it's amazing live. The first time was amazing, mind-shattering, etc.  The second time was actually even better, maybe because the sound system was much better and there were a lot more people there, and because I was amped up to go on that rollercoaster again.  They play live using lots of fog and strobe lighting, like all bands should.  While singer/guitarist Oliver Ackermann is obviously the main focal point, drummer Jason "Jay Space" Weilmeister is an absolute monster.  I mean, holy shit, he was killing it, in a savage-yet-jazz-informed vein not unlike, say, John Stanier of Helmet.  The bassist is no slouch either.  They launch immediately into each song without even a millisecond of pausing, which takes a ton of rehearsal and ears a band the title of being "tight."  They have absolutely no time for between-song banter.  If you want that, go see fucking Guided By Voices or Lil Wayne or Elvis Presley or something.  When people talk about great power trios, let there be no doubt that APTBS is right at the top of the (my) all-time heap, along with Bailter Space, Unwound, Poem Rocket, Hovercraft, and a few others.  Listening to an entire APTBS studio album, on the other hand, can be a bit difficult, due to all the distortion and the relentless sonic overload.  Ackermann also makes guitar pedals guitar effects pedals under the name Death By Audio, and is sometimes overeager to show off his wares on record rather than backing off and letting the songs breathe a bit.

Speaking of breathing, I was able to overcome steady waves of toxic fog to take this pic of them at Chelsea's Café on 10/16/08, using a long shutter speed to get intentional blurs:

As Plexi once sang, "When I was looking at you, I didn't mind your foggy weather"

I unknowingly got into APTBS by hearing about a band called Skywave all the time on the Blisscent mailing list circa 2000-2001.  The main people talking about Skywave at this time were apparently members of Skywave.  I got kind of annoyed by this, but bought their "Don't Say Slow" 7" in the mid-'00s, and later got their full-length CD.  APTBS emerged out of the ashes of Skywave, with a very similar sound, albeit with less (or zero?) synth.  (Skywave's album was titled Synthstatic, and I remember getting a chuckle when someone on Blisscent erroneously transposed a few letters and called it Synthtastic.)  Some other dudes from Skywave went on to form the Joy-Divisionally-monikered band Ceremony.

Anyway, here is the original (ca. 2006) video for the original version of "Shadow Of Your Heart":

The inferior 2010 video for the 2009 re-recording:

That second video was shot by the guitarist from Sian Alice Group, who were the opening act at the APTBS show I saw in '08.

The Joy Formidable + APTBS spring tour, guaranteed by Blowtorch Baby to be the best live show you see all year or else you pay me $20:

03/12/12 - San Francisco, CA - The Independent
03/13/12 - San Francisco, CA - The Independent
03/14/12 - Los Angeles, CA - The Music Box
03/17/12 - Denver, CO - Bluebird Theatre
03/19/12 - Minneapolis, MN - Fine Line Music Cafe
03/20/12 - Madison, WI - Majestic Theatre
03/22/12 - Bloomington, IN - The Bluebird
03/23/12 - Cincinnati, OH - 20th Century Theatre
03/24/12 - Atlanta, GA - The Masquerade
03/25/12 - Asheville, NC - Orange Peel
03/26/12 - Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
03/28/12 - New York, NY - Terminal 5
03/29/12 - Philadelphia, PA - Union Transfer
03/30/12 - Boston, MA - Paradise
03/31/12 - Montreal, QC - Cabaret Mile-End
04/02/12 - Toronto, ON - Lee's Palace

Apparently, hipsters are taking hints from the Amish now

Romney tax plan adds $600 billion to deficit, analysis says - "Though the Tax Policy Center said Romney’s tax plan would 'reduce federal tax revenues substantially, the budget hit isn’t as severe as some of his competitors. The same group previously said former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s tax plan would increase the deficit by $1.3 trillion and that Texas Governor Rick Perry’s proposal would boost the shortfall by $995 billion."

The final sentence. - A blog whose ambitious goal is to post the last sentence of every literary work ever published.  Good luck.  Speaking of books, I bought one the other day (My Brother's Gun by Ray Loriga) because it had a blurb by Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo on the back cover reading "Like the rush of an electric guitar riff charging up your spine, Ray Loriga's voice angles, beautifully desperate, to grasp our place in these chaotic times."  Here is the book's final sentence: "It was nighttime now, and then it would turn into day and all the planes in the world would continue passing through that very same spot."  That's translated from Spanish, so it's not his actual words, but it's pretty good stuff.

Planets with similar climates: Slowdive - "Beach Song" & "Take Me Down" (1992), My Bloody Valentine - "You Made Me Realise" (1988), Plexi - "Fourget" (1996), ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - "Ounce Of Prevention" & "Prince With A Thousand Enemies" (1997).