Liars
Liars
Mute, 2007
By Jessie Skinner
Love them or not, Liars aren’t making music for you, or anyone you know. They’re moving too damn fast for that. I’m hard-pressed to think of any band out there less tethered to a coherent sound or scene; as soon as they seem to nail a genre on one album they pack up and leave it behind. They have followed a path of defied expectations and constant reinvention: making the best album to be called “dance punk” I’ve ever heard, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top; moving to the hellish ambience of They Were Wrong So We Drowned; and then on to something resembling indie-rock war music, Drum’s Not Dead. Their purpose seems to be nothing less than crushing ideas together into a hedonistic lump, spitting out one of the most divisive bodies of work this decade, pulling from a scattershot number of influences while remaining wholly their own artists.
Calling them difficult certainly would’ve suited their previous two albums more so than here, but Liars is no tame beast. Opener “Plaster Casts of Everything” is a riffer pulsing with fucked energy, the kind of energy that is displayed throughout in varying forms. “Houseclouds” indicates a pop-leaning, though this band performs some of the worst singing of any act out there today — of course that is irrelevant to their importance and skill.
You’ll be able to tell right away that this is the catchiest album Liars have made, although like the best noise purveyors they bury the great moments underneath implacable feedback. It often becomes another instrument. Though they are far from the first band to try this wall-of-noise approach, they are among the few who come closest to perfecting it. Abrasiveness is a balancing act in music. Often artists with a taste for sonic obscenity tend to dilute the experience of listening, which is of course supposed to be an enjoyable pastime. The problem everyone had with the obtuse They Were Wrong was the band’s pushing of the scale in the wrong direction, in effect completely draining all the fun out of the room. I haven’t the slightest idea how that one went over at live shows. But Liars is as close as they’ve come to getting it right down the middle as effectively as they can. Drum’s Not Dead got it perfect just once, “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack,” and anyone who found it the most appreciable thing on that album will get more than their share of time out of this disc. You could catch onto the near-danceable “Protection,” or pseudo–classic rocker “Cycle Time.” Either way, I’m happy I can finally recommend this fantastic band to others without feeling the least bit of a pretentious twit.
At least for now I can, as the most surprising thing a band can do after flirting with the mainstream is to retreat back from whence they came. One the best things about being a Liars fan is that I really have no idea what I’m going to hear next, and the threat of the band turning repetitive seems more and more miniscule.
