Music, Record Reviews

New Record: Liars, Liars

Posted by: Johnny Loftus on August 29, 2007 at 1:00 pm

Liars Album

Here it is, your 4am jam for fall. “I wanna run away!” Liars’ Angus Andrew yelps at the outset of “Plaster Casts of Everything,” and the song’s anxious, antic rhythm invites the rest of the world to trample each other trying to follow it to wherever Liars are coming up with this shit. The trio is having fun this time out. Why not? 2001’s They Threw Us in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top was really fun, despite its grim title, and the trio followed that with a load of relentlessly creative, but certifiably fucked up conceptual material that made tasty minced meat out of descriptors like “strange” and “awesome.”

So for “Plaster Casts” (the advance warning for Liars as well as its opener), the silky “Houseclouds,” and the brief acid tab psych-rocker “Cycle Time” to offer a little crafty frivolity alongside typically wacko material like the subway dwelling nightmare “What Would They Know” or the vacant factory industrial wander of “Dumb in the Rain,” well, that’s just these dudes’ prerogative. If Andrew, Aaron Hemphill, and Julian Gross release a ska album next, we won’t be surprised, and it’ll almost certainly be fantastic.

As for the rest of Liars, its extreme edges are linked by stuff like “Protection,” a moody reflection on youth led by layers of keys, as well as the odd beauty of “Sailing to Byzantium,” which must be Liars’ take on soft pop but is of course corroded by their signature poison, a mixture of influences none of us are cool enough to know about and the un-showered funk of their own restlessness, that grit in the belly and the brain that’s inspired the trio to release four full-lengths that share a warped vision but little else. And no one else does that now. Recommended for fall: more Lying. — Johnny Loftus

Liars - Sailing to Byzantium

[audio:http://www.detour-mag.com/audio/SailingToByzantium.mp3]

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