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Big Pink and A Place to Bury Strangers at TLA

Loudness is what links the Big Pink and A Place to Bury Strangers, two buzzworthy bands of different stripes whose common approach centers on extraordinarily amplified constructions.

Loudness is what links the Big Pink and A Place to Bury Strangers, two buzzworthy bands of different stripes whose common approach centers on extraordinarily amplified constructions.

A Place to Bury Strangers is the brainchild of erstwhile venue owner and custom guitar-effect designer Oliver Ackermann, whose show puts a hallucinogenic guitar-vortex spin on his records' goth-industrial Depeche Mode-ish songs. The Big Pink, on the other hand, is much slower-paced, with founders Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell snarling and wafting overheated synthesizer fumes over an unmatchable thud.

Neither band's songs would be much without their gimmicks, which the groups proudly exploit to the fullest in a year when mystique is lacking in indie music. (When's the last time you saw a band with a fog machine?)

Ackermann's trio always kills onstage, and Wednesday night at the Theatre of Living Arts was no different; it has so perfected its post-punk My Bloody Valentine assault that it can toy with it now, mixing in cleaner pop-styled tunes like "Exploding Head" (ironically one of the softer ones) and straight three-note surfabilly ("Deadbeat") among the excruciating (in a good way) noise jams.

The now-traditional climax, "I Lived My Life to Stand in the Shadow of Your Heart," stretched past the 10-minute mark to swallow the room, with band members changing their instruments midsong and throwing them around in the air by the cords. The old-fashioned strobe light gets the point across - performance art at its finest. (The songs are secretly engaging, too, though you'll have to extract them on record, where they're not so deafening.)

The Big Pink is less convincing. On paper the band is hard to describe without being horribly generic: They play electronic-enhanced rock that you can't dance to. Strip their big, fuzzy keyboard slabs and they kind of resemble Oasis. And much like those marginal, genre distinctions, their songs don't leave a big impression despite being extremely catchy. Furze and Cordell moan more than harmonize, and their best hook by a mile was last year's borderline-misogynistic "Dominos" ("these girls fall like . . .").

Onstage it was less guilt-inducing when the most attractive part of the band - those driving, stomping drums - were being played by a woman, Akiko Matsuura. It would be awesome if she had written the song, too. Though with this band she may just be standing in the shadow of its heart - assuming it has one.