Liars They Were Wrong, So We Drowned Mute I'm with the Liars: fuck dance-punk. The Liars just weren't satisfied merely being the most challenging and interesting of the current cluster of dance-punk acts: they've now eclipsed the genre altogether. Rather than play a game of name-that-influence (like the Rapture), they've turned their back on 'the scene' and have moved into totally weird and uncharted waters. I'll say it again: fuck dance-punk. But the Liars don't just fuck dance-punk (the most fashionable of retro-genres). They fucking rape it, flay its skin off, break its legs so it can't run away and smash its teeth out so they can rape its bloody mouth-hole too. Liars are absolutely brutal and They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, their sophomore album, is the equivalent of a snuff film with dance-punk as its victim: at the end the genre's dead body lies cooling in a messy pile of blood, sweat and ejaculates. Sounds disgusting, right? Well that's exactly how you'll feel after listening to the They Were Wrong…, a drastic redirection for the band and a messy, abrasive take on modern post-punk. The album is creepy and flat-out deranged, weaving punk attitude together with demonic witchcraft symbolism and harsh electronically manipulated sounds. The closest comparison in terms of atmosphere would be the dark psychedelic post-punk of Wire's Chair's Missing, but that's really as close as Liars come to any type of traditional dance- or post-punk influences. On the first track, "Broken Witch" they use that little distorted noise that you get when you touch an unplugged guitar cord to a piece of metal as part of the rhythm. Now that's fucking inventive! The song slowly builds to an explosive climax as a trashy drum machine takes over. It occasionally drops the beat on purpose while vocalist Angus Andrew chants over and over again, "We are the armies you see through the red haze of blood / blood, Blood, BLOOD," rising to a shout at the song's sweat-soaked climax. All the song titles are very creepy and the vocals are distorted most of the time, with nearly every lyric shouted, chanted or screamed horrifically. There is such a tribal feel to a lot of the songs that I half expect Liars to be a traveling band of cannibals from the Amazon. The track, "We Fenced Our Houses With the Bones of Our Own" starts with a bass drum and floor tom beating out a slow, airy rhythm that only stops every once in a while to do a roll and allow a call of "Fly, fly / the devil's in your eye / shoot, shoot / we're doomed, we're doomed!" The lead vocals are, as always, chanted, while the background vocals are high wailings set over an extremely dirty bassline. "They Don't Want Your Corn, They Want Your Kids" is probably the closest the band gets to their old material with this album. It retains the band's quick, catchy basslines and Gang of Four-influenced (circa Entertainment!) beats, complimented by a pulsing synthesizer throughout. Some of the experiments fall flat though. "There's Always Room on the Broom" is an annoying series of whining manipulated feedback tones, with falsetto witch-wails and a minimal high-hat disco beat. Meanwhile, "Read the Book That Ate Itself" is a mood piece primarily constructed from the sound of a pencil on paper. Loud thumps and crashes ring out in the background like the sound of a storm. As a backing track to something else it might be compelling, but on its own it's drawn out and boring. Chances are good that you're not going to like this album. Most people won't: it takes effort to enjoy, it takes time to digest and it takes analysis to understand. Most of its impact comes from mood and atmosphere, that's why if you ever run a haunted house, this is the music that should play in it. You're not going to need cheap plastic skeletons or guys wrapped in toilet-paper if you've got this dark, brooding album that takes listeners from one side of hell to another. It's a big "fuck you" to all those people who thought they were just a rhythm section. See, Liars got so many compliments on their dance-punk beats, that they decided they would have to drastically change their sound. It also helped that their bass player and drummer quit before they started recording. But then again it's not even really a "fuck you" it's more of a "Hey look, we can do anything we want, rape dance-punk, make it weird as fuck and still come out on top and make an utterly unique album." -exadore / austin 3/19/04

Liars They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top Mute/Blast First

When was the last time you can remember a real rock and roll band that genuinely disliked their audience? A frontman who taunted his fans, a band that never quite gave you what you asked for? Not as a pose, not out of arrogance or hatred but just because they really didn't give a shit at all how many people enjoyed what they did. As long as there were these people watching, the frontman might as well fuck with them, challenge them. You can count them on one hand: Johnny Rotten did it, Iggy Pop most certainly did it, Lou Reed did during both his solo career and his time with the Velvet Underground and by the end of his career Elvis did too. But who's the last one you can really remember, Kurt Cobain maybe? Today's stars are sanitized and lovable, always afraid of alienating their fans, either that or they have an 'edgy' image they need to maintain ala the Vine/Hives and their arrogance toward their audience is precalculated or just disrespectful. Nobody is jumping on knives or stabbing themselves with glass bottles any more, most people's Iggy Pop impression just involves a slight tilt to their hips and jumping around occasionally. Nobody is releasing full albums of feedback and claiming it's classical music and nobody's hitting cowboys in the head with bass guitars anymore. Lou Reed and Johnny Rotten copies are just content to lay some distortion and a sneer on their music. Enter the Liars. They don't really give a shit if you like them or not, honestly. Their album titles are all Fiona Apple length and their songs never quiet give you what you want but instead maybe they give you what rock has needed for a long while. The Liars album is all dirty production, Public Image Ltd. dance-punk beats (thanks to both a live drummer and a drum machine used simultaneously), menacing bass, minimal but destructive guitars and a huge chunk of attitude. To try on contemporary comparisons: take Q and not U and replace their love of Fugazi and artsy intelligence with a Stooges or Nirvana influence and a fucking mean streak. Vocalist Angus Andrews seems to have only two variations, either he's speaking or he's yelping, but he's always pissed off. The influence of Gang of Four prevails though as the band attempts to contain their rage and focus it over some great dance beats. "Mr. Your On Fire Mr." operates on a stop-start pattern, rocking for about two seconds and then completely dying. The entire first verse follows this pattern, eventually filling in the holes with almost-cheesy sounding drum machine claps and radio noise until the whole thing is just one solid rhythm with a bizarre kind of flow. The chorus bursts open with the kind of catchy dance rhythm that Public Image Ltd. built entire 7-minute songs around. This one clocks in at under two and half minutes. The songs ends with the call and response "Mister, you're on fire mister! Thanks but I'm ok." Most of the album operates like this: songs die right when they sound ready to take off; where you want a total rock-out all you get is a drum-machine fill; once you find the grooves the band has already moved onto something else; and where you expect a breakdown you get a total mush of mid-tones where you can't even tell what the fuck is going on. This type of "fuck you" songwriting does naturally engender some less than enjoyable moments though. "Nothing Is Ever Lost or Can be Lost My Science Friend" is terrible. It moves along at a slow pace with weird noises and an extremely high pitched, extremely annoying four-note guitar line that repeats over and over for almost the entire song. "This Dust Makes That Mud" ends with a four-second loop repeated for fucking 25 minutes! That's almost as long as the entire rest of the album and it makes the song just about unlistenable. But really when was the last time a band pulled such a blatant stunt like that? It's like a huge slap in the face as you sit there for 25 minutes, waiting for something to change but nothing ever does until the CD finally just ends. Every time after that first long listen, you have to take the album off during this track. It's a terrible song but how incredibly bold of them. "This Dust Makes That Mud" is the sound of the Liars issuing a challenge to their listeners, "You paid for this CD, are you going to turn it off before it's even over?" They win every time. -exadore 3/24/03