More a compilation than an album, “Rare and Deadly” covers a lot of ground, spanning songs and experiments written in the time between 2015’s Transfixation and a little after 2024’s Synthesizer. The tracks are as texturally rich as APTBS has always been, and it’s more often than not a love letter to those who prefer the B-sides and the rejects of anything. That gives the project a serrated edge; many of these songs sound different, not as a whole other idea, but as if hailing from different sessions where different tools were available to the evolving band. As loud as it’s ever been, this concept works out in their favor, as the seemingly random bursts of energy and non-conventional flow work for them in ways that are as jagged as they’ve always striven to be. For an album with a track called “Out of place”, everything is so intrinsic and visceral that there isn’t something you could really call a sore thumb without pointing at everyone else.
The collection is nearly a scavenger hunt, as the CD, Vinyl, Cassette, and digital versions all offer different tracklists that function as partial views into the complete piece that is the album. For the sake of transparency, my comments are based on the digital release for streaming, as my copy did not arrive in time for this review. Since this is a loosely connected run of songs, building them up in different ways makes sense, and is even connected to the way the band went about the project, saying they even dug up old songs that were lost to memory
“Crash“ is aptly named. The third track hits you after the relative calm and serenity offered in the final couple of minutes from track two: “On the wire”. All the while, it struck me as one of the most familiar in the collection so far, with a swelling riff that’s as intense as those “You wouldn’t steal a car” commercials. Then cuts in a super reverbed (and overdriven) vocal line, almost reminiscent of a track from their 2018 album Pinned: “Never coming back”, and I don’t think it would be anachronistic to suggest both of these were simultaneously on the drawing board at some point. I personally don’t mind similarities in rarities, as I often find recontextualizing a riff, a sound, or a texture just as valid an experiment and consequently as worthy of a release. The band is no stranger to this concept, also coming off a steady run of albums featuring remixes of older tracks.
Rises and falls come packaged inside every single song. Sometimes energy between tracks explodes and implodes. Trying to get a grasp on why these songs became rarities in the first place always seems to point to the fact that, looking back at their 23 years as a band, whatever they would offer on an album that is the weird kid club inside the weird kid club, it wouldn’t be because they were lackluster, timid, or meek attempts. Most of these serve and go beyond their purpose at conception, and were probably shaved off in favor of a bigger, album-spanning vision. In the ups and downs intensity-wise, I observed the run from “heartless” to “losing time” to be distinctly a plateau, a valley of closer listening, something almost more restrained. The sister songs, likely hailing from the same era, drive home the idea that this isn’t simply a collection of rando songs, but more an archeological and introspective look into the band’s past 10 years.
A CD-era band in a digital age, APTBS chose to release singles before and after the album dropped. As I have broadly understood it, the runway of singles leading up to the record is largely a modern phenomenon, inverting the classic singles-from-the-album that predominated scenes worldwide when the project was born. I think it’d be erroneous to assume the band chose to subscribe to streaming’s absurd quotas for activity, and instead, in their classic fashion, barraged us, this time blitzing the singles only a few days apart and dropping the whole album smack dab in the middle of the run. For everything that might be tedious about the promotion and business side of bands, I like how Oliver Ackermann injects their signature into it. I’m glad to see a project like this be so active, to see the loudest band in the world keep yelling their asses off at us.
Take a listen to Rare and Deadly below:
Written by Charlotte Lacambra
