Similar to the daunting task of getting a bead on a band’s live sound on record, capturing the spectacle and energy of the live performance on camera, especially for an official music video, is all too often a lackluster affair. In their newest video for “We’ve Come so Far”, off this year’s Dead Oceans release, Transfixation, A Place to Bury Strangers, set a few humble yet difficult goals—encapsulating their wildly psychotropic stage presence, paying homage to longtime beloved home Death by Audio, and melting faces—and slays them. Comprised entirely of live footage taken from their last ever DBA set, fittingly, at DBA’s last show ever, paired with the hauntingly dronish album audio as a backdrop, the video offers the tumultuous, astonishing, and at times panic-stricken ambience of a real APTBS set.
A tracking shot follows the band through a most welcoming crowd (apparently one of their birthdays coincided with the closing), and onto the stage, while opening credits read, “After nearly 10 years of music and art, Death by Audio was forced to close. On November 22, 2014, A Place to Bury Strangers played the last show,” and fading into the incessant strobes and smoke-heavy silhouettes of them playing. Taken from several angles—always in shadow, always in visual uncertainty—the images don’t quite do the intensity of their set justice, but it’s the next best thing to being right there in the pit. Hands fly, crowdsurfing bodies flail, and it only getting crazier as it progresses, the disorder of the camera’s shots mirroring the song’s noise-infused closing.
