Tag: women in music

Brooklyn’s A Place To Bury Strangers have been launching sonic assaults on the eardrums of their cult following for over a decade. Driving the trio’s sound is drummer Lia Braswell; who plays with a raw, punishing, and unpredictable style that’s best appreciated live.

If you’ve never experienced APTBS’s live show, you now have access to the next best thing: London’s Fuzz Club recorded a live session with the band last year and have released the recording exclusively on vinyl (available for purchase here).

We wanted to know more about what drives Lia to be the expert musician that she is, so we asked her to share her “Five Favourite” albums with us. Check out her choices below, and make sure you watch the Fuzz Club recording of ‘Punk Back’ at the end of this post too!

1. The Slits – Cut
When I first listened to this album, it changed my perspective of how punk music could sound. Primal, evocative, sensual but also very feminine. Something like an album that either came out of an imaginative shower or a communal dance around a bonfire, both introspective yet objective and literate. Initially, it was the album that I was searching for all throughout my angsty and awkward junior high school years, but didn’t find until after I was out of school. Then again, it might have inspired me to drop out before graduating!

2. Scout Niblett – The Calcination of Scout Niblett 
Simple, jagged, heavy. This album CUTS. It’s the inner snarky child who takes back their power and runs with it as an awakened grown up. After my roommate and I discovered that we have a mutual love for Scout, we busted out this record and started interpretive dancing to all the motions of fuzzed out guitar bends and primal drum breakdowns. This album brings so much raw emotion into an empowering force of self-affirming vigilance. Hell YES.

3. Broadcast – Future Crayon
Enchanting, subjective, expansive. What a beautiful masterpiece of subtle psychedelia mixed with dreamscapes that continue to resonate in the mind long after listening to the record. Such looseness in the drums, atmospheric bliss all around, and one of the most controlled and calming voices that graced this planet for far too short a life. It dials my heartbeat into a harmonious wake of contentment.

4. Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr. – We Insist! Freedom Now Suite 
This is the album that makes jazz what it means to me. Historical, melodic, passionate, and rhythmic. What a powerful album. It is rich with so much history and depth. No matter how many times you listen, you still can’t break into it. You can’t break it down. It is still alive. It is still so real and raw nearly sixty years after it was recorded. This is the kind of album that should be explored in educational institutions and should remain to be one of the most prolific records ever to have been recorded.

5. Department of Eagles – In Ear Park
A bit out of left field here, but this album was pretty essential to my life when it first came out. The melodies, the harmonies, the rhythm of the album catches me in a way that not many other albums have. It evokes a melancholy wrapped up in a waltz of dreamscapes along a tired river. I will most likely listen to this album when I am sixty years old and suddenly memories that were long forgotten will suddenly appear as if they were of the yesterdays.

Huge thanks to Lia for sharing her favourites. We’ve got some listening to catch up on! Follow A Place To Bury Strangers on Facebook for more updates.