How Liars albums are like episodes of Lost, and how they duped Nashville
by Matt Sullivan
Through all of Liars' drastic turns on a dime and self-reinventions, the common threads have always been there. The band's first three albums plays out like a season of Lost. Just when you think they're making shit up as they go along — throwing ideas against a wall and hoping something sticks — they put out another album that somehow puts a lot of what came before in perspective. The rest they pretend never happened.
Liars started out in 2000, releasing They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top in 2001, at the forefront of what was then an emergent dance-punk scene in New York. But instead of sticking with the conventional wisdom of capitalizing on success, they did their best to alienate. While their sophomore album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, still has a dancey groove sitting at its deconstructed core, the rest is all dressed up in a contorted mess of strangled synthesizers and instrument splatter. They followed that kitchen-sink approach with understated sparseness, making Drum's Not Dead, an album that almost completely divorces the band from their dance-punk roots and focuses instead on pulsating rhythmic soundscapes.
Each of these records recontextualizes the preceding one. Album two made the first seem weirder, while album three brought out the subtleties of two. When the band released their self-titled album in 2007, they had connected all these mismatched jigsaw puzzle pieces and made a pop album. These jokers clearly know what they're doing, and most often what they're doing seems to be whatever the hell they want. But however these guys end up deciding they're going to sound from album to album, it always sounds like the same group of guys. Liars records are funny, dark, weird, sometimes pretentious and often poignant. A lot of the good ones are.
Released earlier this year, Sisterworld differs a bit from the expected, in that it doesn't sound like the band hit the reset button this time around, so much as bumped up the intensity. The arrangements are more ornate, while the album on the whole sounds darker than anything they've ever done, both musically and lyrically. Chromatic guitar lines crawl in and out of one another while vocalist Angus Andrews sings about demons and "counting victims one by one." It's mysterious and ambitious, and everything we wish more bands would start trying.
But now we have a bone to pick. Last time Liars were in Nashville was 2007, opening for Interpol at The Ryman. It was a strange prospect for a couple reasons. One was the general suckiness of their tourmates, and the other was the idea of Liars playing in a room even close to that big. There's a certain degree of intimacy that's minimal with this stuff, and imagining Liars' weirdo tendencies ever holding the attention of a crowd that large seems daunting even for them. But they did pack an in-store performance earlier that day at Grimey's, after which they promised to be back in town later that year on their own tour, and at a smaller venue. Like we said, that was in 2007. Liars, indeed.
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