What Is The Fucking Deal With Liars?

Portland | Ian Anderson

What is the fucking deal with Liars? No, not people who lie, I mean the band Liars; ever since they entered the realm of things that I am aware of they haven’t done anything except fuck with my head. Last winter I went to this show that they played at Dante’s, it was one of those times where you go to the show for the band that you are really going to love in six months, but you don’t know that yet, and you end up going home with an ugly girl and hand-fucking her back at her place, but the thing that haunts you the next afternoon isn’t really the girl’s REALLY creepy fucking glassy eyes, but the fact that the band you saw the night before looked totally homeless and were screaming the word “blood” repeatedly over the sound of some foreign drone, and you’re still not sure what to think of it.

BUT-

Six months later:

You are in the record store that is going out of business and you decide to buy their second album on a whim, because it’s like seven bucks and though you can’t remember the girls name, you still remember that singer looks like a hecka tall gaunt demon wearing a human suit.

You listen to the record, which is called “They Were Wrong So We Drowned”, and you are like “FUCK! What the fuck is this?!” because you’re mind has been blown, and your finding this band is like a guitar on a delay pedal that has the depth and time cranked all the way up and your fondness for Liars is just boomeranging its way into the mix of existence. This all from the album that got panned by the critics.

As you dive deeper in you discover that their first record, which was cut with a bassist and a different drummer, is a total post-punk revival, and has very little in common with the drony guitars and harsh LFO-based rhythms of the second album. Yet it blows your mind in a different way.

You start asking yourself if these guys are the Italo Calvino of music when you hear their third full length, which is all atmospheric, but dissonant synth drones over a rhythmic wall of sound created by filtering floor toms through an ungodly amount of effects pedals.

Now you have them pegged you’re like “Liars first album is rad, but I really like how they have settled in with the new rhythm section. This noise-rock shit is TIGHT!” You even buy a Wolf Eyes album and start going to see ‘avant-garde’ bands play at your local hipster bar. You start thinking that “Noise is the future.” You buy a sampler and start making field recordings of children talking and engines roaring. You shoot pshaw’s at pop and folk records. You wear start wearing black, lots of black.

Then Liars release their latest album and everything is dispelled.

It’s a pop album! And it is one of the best pop albums you have ever heard. You can finally hear their influences. You’re surprised by how much you like it even though a few of the cuts sound like they could make it onto the radio. You start learning songs from Dark Side of the Moon on guitar, because you just want to play something real, something people can understand.

Then you see that Liars are touring coliseums with Interpol…

But you know what, “fuck it,” you think, because you know that it would be impossible for this band to sell out, because they never claimed to be anything. It’s like saying DEVO sold out. You think that their last album is just as artistic and fresh as the ones that came before it and that it might be the best case for ironic music since “Rock the Casbah.”

But maybe you should find it all for yourself. Listening to Liars has totally reshaped the way I think about music. They’re refreshingly morbid, like if Eno tried to make a metal album.