Liars

When Angus Andrew, frontman of the Liars, appears on the stage of the Extra Club in Recanati, Macerata, the small crowd that until a few minutes earlier had been calling for his entrance falls silent for a moment. The bearded, imposing Australian towers over everyone and everything from the small stage set up for him and his fellow travelers, thanks to his considerable height but above all to a charisma whose nature, at first, we find hard to pin down. Then, when "It Fit When I Was a Kid" kicks in, taken from Drum's Not Dead (2006), we immediately understand what makes Andrew naturally able to rise above the crowd – any crowd – and dominate it: it's the allure of someone who has explored suburban hells, abysses of madness, black holes of the self, tears in the fabric of sidereal depravity, and has survived to tell the tale. Because that's exactly what Liars' music is: a frozen fresco of loneliness, despair, schizophrenia, pain, death.

But before all that, the small crowd huddled around the singer like a flock of adoring believers surrounding an ancient, dark and menacing deity (except here there are no blood sacrifices on offer, just wild pogoing) had fed its anticipation of the Event by first making a stop in procession at the "station" of Lush Rimbaud.

The band from Falconara (Ancona), responsible for two excellent albums ("Action From The Basement" from 2007 and "The Sound Of The Vanishing Era", released last year), delivered, over the course of a short but incisive set that started around 11:00 pm, waves of feverish post-punk rhythms, ferociously noisy guitar work, synthetic kraut-style minimalism and psych digressions. Tommaso Pela (guitar, vocals, synth), Davide Cavalloro (guitar, synth), Marco Giaccani (bass, theremin, vocals) and Michele Alessandrini (drums) hammered hard on the eardrums and nerves of those present with tracks such as "Flashing Elevator" (an instrumental built on the minimalist interplay between a decidedly dark-wave pulsing bass and obsessive, incisive guitars, which degenerates in the finale into sonic chaos), "Sounds From A Vanishing Era" (a pulsing nightmare built on ultra-distorted six-strings, alienating vocals and unsettling electronic touches), "God Trip" (fiery and hypnotic at once), "Sounds From A New Era" (which grafts a glacial spoken-word delivery onto a wall of guitar distortion that melts, in the end, into a cathartic finale), the unreleased "Night Trip" (which is exactly what the title says, a hallucinated "trip" into dark territories) and a surprising cover of Brian Eno's "Third Uncle" (taken from the masterpiece "Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy", 1974), which in the hands of the Marche-based quartet becomes a fierce, ultra-percussive delirium seasoned with searing noise guitars.

A few minutes to rest our eardrums, then back on the march, heading for the second and final stop before the Destination, before finally reaching Their presence. The set in question belongs to John Wiese, a hyper-prolific Californian composer (he boasts an extensive solo discography, runs the LHD and Sissy Spacek projects, and has collaborated, among others, with the likes of Sunn O))), Wolf Wyes, Merzbow and Kevin Drumm). Indeed, Wiese's performance, a guru of the free-noise scene, is the one moment of the evening that feels out of place: he unleashes a tense, harsh, delirious stream of cacophony and noise that nonetheless doesn't quite fit either the venue or the program of the event.

When the small, somewhat unassuming Wiese leaves the stage, the area below it starts to fill up. They're about to arrive. After a very brief soundcheck, the four Liars finally appear.

The stage is crowded with guitars, keyboards, drums, percussion, pedals and effects of every kind. After all, the sound the band has put forward over a career that began in 2001 with "They Threw Us All In A Trench and Stuck a Monument On Top" and continued with "They Were Wrong, So We Drowned" (2004), "Drum's Not Dead" (2006), "Liars" (2007) and the very recent "Sisterworld" (2010), is a concentrate of post-punk/new-wave (Pop Group, Virgin Prunes, Gang Of Four, A Certain Ratio), industrial (Throbbing Gristle), noise-rock (Sonic Youth) and 90s psychedelia (Mercury Rev).

A hint of a greeting, and straight away comes "It Fit When I Was A Kid", a sort of spectral pagan ceremony in the form of a dark chant. "Clear Island" (from 2007's "Liars") pushes a little harder on the accelerator, delivering an obsessive, pounding, hypnotic punk-funk. The seductive "No Barrier Fun" (from "Sisterworld") sets the stage for "In The Flat Field", a cover of Bauhaus, taken from the eponymous 1980 album, a milestone of dark-wave. But it's "Plaster Casts Of Everything" (again from "Liars") that unleashes the wildest pogo, with its mix of hammering rhythms, powerful guitar blasts and alienated vocals. "Broom" (taken from the 2004 EP "There's Always Room On The Broom") captivates with its mantra-like cadences, but it's "Scissor" (the first single from "Sisterworld") that truly thrills the crowd: the song plays on the alternation between moments of sonic stasis and passages built on slashing guitars and powerful rhythms, and it's made all the more striking by Andrew's hallucinated performance, as he moves on stage as though possessed by dark, terrible forces. "Proud Evolution" (again from "Sisterworld") shows fully how what we're witnessing is less a concert than a kind of mass shamanic ritual, a collective exorcism: pulsing bass, tribal rhythms and "spatial" keyboards form the bed over which an obsessive litany unfolds, perfectly suited to the dancefloor. "Sailing to Byzantium" (pulled from "Liars") continues in the same vein, offering another example of their melodicism, both ethereal and spectral at once, with a finale dominated by Andrews' unsettling falsetto and synthetic colourings of every kind. "Scarecrows On A Killer Slunt" (again from "Sisterworld") is the peak of Liars' anarchic, post-punk/no-wave madness, a distillation of terrifying guitar distortion driven by relentless rhythms.

The undisputed star of the whole set (despite the contribution of excellent musicians, above all guitarist/percussionist Aaron Hemphill, also handling electronics), Angus Andrew is just as capable of sinking into dark meditations marked by macabre melodies that seem rooted in ancient pagan rites as he is of intoning chilling hymns steeped in searing post-industrial anguish.

By the end of the concert-ceremony (which lasted around an hour and a half), the crowd is satisfied and exhausted, drained by the catharsis just reached. One can go back home, to the everyday bourgeois calm, but with the awareness of having glimpsed, if only for an instant, the Abyss...

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