Liars - The No Wave Aftershock

The healthcare system of the United States of America — specifically its psychiatric branch — is not all-powerful; post-modern/neo-millennial culture feeds, bulimically, on apparent madness, the table of values is trans-valued, and the musical intelligentsia wraps itself in a self-satisfied delirium.

The ways of pursuing originality are many and varied: old glories pitifully touch up their make-up, others, with genuine courage, wear the marks of time openly, new acts stubbornly ape their elders like mules, posers are never in short supply, indie-pop is sometimes entertaining, sometimes a yawn-inducing bore, live shows rarely induce ecstasy, and the demanding/emotional listener keeps waiting for that long-craved punch in the gut.

If it's true that catharsis comes through a phase of painful shaking, a therapy that calls for the administration of harrowing nightmares, gruesome images one cannot look away from, the sinister leers of some malevolent force twisting the features of a face, the creaking of unsettling machinery, bestial metamorphoses — then there are still nurses/outlaws who, slipping free of the control of a slimily politically correct authority, periodically return to tinker with the electroshock machine. Liars, like demons ex machina risen from the bowels of the earth, arrive to dose out sonic shocks that blow right past the daily requirement of endorphins and/or push beyond any state of calm, which, in the best case, becomes an irresistible fall into a spiral of dark psychedelia bordering on stupor.

Like an entity that slips, unscathed, into the skin of the most blazing dragon, the lanky Angus Andrew, together with guitarist and percussionist Aaron Hemphill, bassist Pat Noecker and drummer Ron Albertson, set about bursting the eardrum of an eschatologically delirious New York gripped by millennial phobias in 2000, with the album They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top.

The musical system, numbed and tamed after the distant, now blurred follies of no wave, is seized, wrung out, shaken, like some modest white-collar type saddened by the regret of long-faded youthful glories. Liars' sonic morphology stands out, in fact, as a conspiracy against the slumber of human consciousness, a blind and esoteric fury, at times almost super-human, given the sheer physical charge and the potential for psychic shock already present from the first album.

On They Threw Us All in a Trench And Stuck there are no smiles, only mocking sneers; there's no ray of sunshine, only dark sunglasses to shield against its very invasion — forget about any leniency, because reality is seized, turned upside down, twisted around, accused, sadistically tortured with surreal disdain.

Right away comes the furious call to an audience distracted by the uproar of human stupidity: Angus Andrew, growing ever angrier in a sinister crescendo, screams "Can you hear us? Can you hear us? Can you hear us?", backed by the frontal assault of drums that sweep everything away ("Grown Men Don't Just Fall In A River Like That"). Next, mister X, emblem of mediocrity, is attacked from behind by the punk-funk shrapnel of "Mr You're On Fire, Mr", with a manic, tightrope-walking swagger reminiscent of Red Hot Chili Peppers.

A fierce This Heat-style beast prowls moodily and ready to strike in "The Garden Was Crowded And Outside", showing off its most acidic side in the homage/sample of ESG's scratchy sound ("Tumbling Walls Buried Me in Debris with ESG").

The brutal bass funk, alternated with fake-pop guitar jangle, bursts into the control room with "We Live NE In Compton", closed out by the long catatonia of the visionary, intimate soliloquy inaccessible to any outside ear that is "This Dust Makes This Mud", a track running roughly 30 agonizing minutes.

Fueling the buzz of their debut, Liars recorded the EP Fink To Make Us More Fish Like, which, alongside a reprise of "Grown Men Don't Fall In The River, Just Like That", features the urgent rush of "Pillars Were Hollow And Filled With Candy So We Tore Them Down" and the schizoid clubbing of "Everyday Is A Child With Teeth"; that same year they released the split Atheists Reconsider, a little gem of shared energy and deflagration, achieved through mutual covering, with Oneida, another prodigy of the early-2000s New York scene.

The feeling is one of a germinal, confused state, immediately declared by Liars on "Rose And Licorice", only to then be thrown in the listener's face by Oneida ("Privilege"), who, with "Fantastic Morgue", prepare for the punk damnation of their cover of "Every Day Is A Child With Teeth". Liars, virtuosos of irreverence, recite the nursery rhyme of "All in All In A Careful Party" with provocative nonchalance, and splice together alienating snatches of conversation driven to obsession by the tolling of a compulsive xylophone ("Dorothy Taps The Toe Of The Famil"), recalling certain personality disorders in the Death In June lineage.

After two more years advancing toward the most hallucinated abyss, a line-up change (the departure of Noecker and Albertson and the arrival of Julian Gross on drums) and two EPs - We No Longer Knew Who We Were, brimming with cynical punk-funk ("I Hate Stupid Phones") and punk 'n' roll shoves ("Every Two Hours With A Ducks Fan"), and There's Always Room On The Broom, containing the two unreleased tracks "Skull & Crossbrooms" (short and instrumental) and "Broom" (yet another passage from the mantra breviary) - comes the new trip: the obsession with witchcraft, the brink of heresy, the most macabre hallucinogen, mixed into a lethal potion, give birth to They Were Wrong So We Drowned.

The colour grows ever darker, fractured into pulsing particles of deep red, a hypnotic pull. The album opens with an industrial stride, echoing the footsteps of a Masonic initiation rite deep in narcosis, perfectly rendered by the force of Hemphill's percussion ("Broken Witch"). The Pop Group entity bursts in and turns the air inside out with the half-howl of "There's Alwais Room On The Bro", while, on the altar of culture, the rite of black cloaks is about to be celebrated around "We Fenced Other Houses With Bones of Our Own", with its urban litany ("Fly, fly, the devil's in your eyes... shoot... shoot").

Dawns following nocturnal sabbaths gaze, from the edge, into the oceanic abyss ("Read The Book That Wrote Itself"). Tales of urban madness spin in the dizzying vortex of "They Took 14 For the Rest Of O", before an unexpected organ marks the closing, Floyd-like nursery rhyme ("Flow My Tears the Spider Said").

The beauty of the second album is further underlined by the release of another striking EP, accompanied by three videos: We Fenced Other Gardens With The Bones Of Our Own, home to "Sex Boy", a Germs cover turned into a wild shard, like a straitjacket torn off in a fit of fury, and "The Fountain And Its Monologue", an inhuman instrumental of distant echoes, "disturbed" by subterranean pounding.

The striking impact of They Were Wrong So We Drowned is confirmed by a long tour that also takes in Italy. The sense of abduction already stirred up by the studio records becomes inescapable once co-opted into the live show. Andrew makes no secret of his agitated, iconoclastic personality, showing up in pinstriped suit-pajamas on a stage that becomes almost a zoo cage, from which he screams and writhes, winning over a crowd entranced by the primitive, lethal energy.

All of this hints at further savagery culminating in an irrational, definitive loss of control, in the mocking lobotomy of all stupidity. What happens instead, unexpectedly, is far more measured: in early 2006 comes Drum's Not Dead, an album shaped by a clean change of residence, shifting the centre of gravity of their research from the phantasmagoria of New York to the essentialism of Berlin.

As if uprooting themselves from a place that had lost all its naturalness, the band seems to carry out an act of deep introspection, producing a work that, this time, is born from the body upward. The approach starts from a still-ancestral genealogy of the world, almost animated, in its deepest layers, by a paganism celebrated through percussion - a paganism that finds, among its deities, Drum and Mt Heart Attack. The two entities coexist in a dialectical dynamism, out of whose tension earthly affairs take place, seen, from the creators' depths, as refractions of an illusory unicum, deceptive to those who wallow within it.

Anticipating the volcanic atmosphere of Drum's Not Dead were two EPs, It Fit When I Was A Kid and The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack; the former, besides a remix of the title track, houses the punk-industrial of "Frozen Glacier Of Mastadon Blood" and the bolt-tightening of "Bingo! Count Draculuk". On The Other Side Of Mt Heart Attack, alongside two remixes of the title track and of "Drum And The Uncomfortable Can", the pneumatic drill of the unreleased "Do As The Birds, Eat The Remains" tears through the foundations.

And finally, there's Drum's Not Dead: the opening drags behind it an aura reminiscent of "Amnesiac", blurred into an overly stretched horizon, carried almost to ecstasy by the percussion ("Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attcak") which, having taken over the scene, summons, like a magic flute, the vocals too, into a single, anguished invocation ("Let's Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack").

As if summoned for an imminent, cosmic sumo bout, Drum arrives, tainting the air with a presence just as powerful and decisive for the outcome of the conflict: the voice turns into a hallucinated, slow intonation over a slowed-down sonic carpet ("A Visit From Drum"). Brushing against a psychedelia close to the Mercury Rev brand, "It Fit When I Was a Kid" advances, played out through the schizophrenia of an ego capable of shifting voice and mood in step with the percussion and piano, like an identity suspended between waking and sleep.

Introduced by an obsessive chant, Drum returns, summoned with drugged devotion ("Hold You Drum"), interrupted by a brief, dark warning to Mt Heart Attack, and carried by the emotional drive of "Drum And The Uncomfortable Can".

After the twilit, Virgin Prunes-style tribalism of "You, Drum", the album closes with the astonishing surprise of a calm, lysergic ballad dedicated to Mt Heart Attack ("The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack"), a moment of tensional release following discord.

Afterwards, only silence: the gaze settles, stunned, on the rubble of erosion and, frightened, shies away from the temptation to look straight into the eyes of the delirium lurking in the terrible, destabilizing shadow of human reason.

The conscience, offended by the general state of things, craves instead new outbursts of rage that, like seismic movements, might destroy everything and shake it all up, bending the system's self-conviction of omnipotence to an awareness of its own wretchedness, and turning false randomness into terrible fate.

Having reached the dividing line between Eros and Thanatos, it seems that with Liars (2007) the New York band chose a controversial limbo, built on the illusory conviction of "being inside" the system — a conviction nonetheless tempted by the most anguished, terrifying and cathartic nightmares, which at times return in all their demystifying force ("Leather Prowler"), at times dissolve into catatonic guitars disturbed by sinister background noise ("What Would They Know"), at other times break through the toughest layer of the nervous system with drumming pounded like a jackhammer divertissement ("Pure Unevil"), before chasing the mirage of what came immediately before, now blurred by a new belonging to a reality that clouds the view ("The Dumb in the Rain").

The search for a lost unicum continues with the unexpected hard-rock guitar roar that tries to give the work more immediacy ("Cycle Time") and a fake voodoobilly darkness intro that loses itself in an alt-rock not too bloated ("Freak Out").

To close, almost as if to prove they haven't disowned a certain fortunate past, there's a return to the most acidic and psychedelic punk-funk, à la They Were Wrong So We Drowned ("Clear Island"), and a black-and-white ballad for organ, drums, voice and effects, able to anticipate a certain yearning autumnal mood ("Protection").

The ability to skillfully stir everything up to pull out the most alluring nightmares and, at the same time, seduce them all the way to catharsis — even by choosing the path of a more difficult heterogeneity — gives us back an unexpected record, more complex than it seems and free from the anxiety of becoming a definitive masterpiece.

In the three years separating Liars from Sisterworld (2010), the apparent calm in which we had left them gives way to tensions that surge forth like boiling volcanic matter. "Scissor" is the dangerous instrument moving in the hands of a man afflicted by multiple personality disorder (“I found her/ With my scissor/ This heart fell/ To the round/ I’m supposed to save you now/ But my hands are freaking out”), whose alternating moods are effectively rendered by a sorrowful, messianic intro, in the manner of an ambiguous new Lizard King, before exploding into Angus's percussive falsetto and falling back into line with the gravity of an organ. Where "Barrier No Fun" leaves the aftertaste of a party, albeit a mournful one, in which the sense of alienation is embroidered into the air by a violin à-la Tuxedomoon, "Drip" is a creaking ritual, a Mephistophelian ambient, an opiate ceremony for the few initiated.

No wave that quotes itself, and neurosis, all explode in the homicidal madness of "Scarecrows On A Killer Slunt", an act of fierce salvation from lives unaware of their own mediocrity, as the closing refrain states ("How can they be saved from the way they live every day?"), seasoned with distortions à-la Throbbing Gristle, before going for a stroll with Radiohead through a Hades thick with fine sulfurous dust ("Drop Dead"). Having served the dancefloor accustomed to dancing to Liars (and how liberating it is!) with "The Overachievers", the album closes with dreamlike material drawn from the most narcotic of evanescences ("Too Much Too Much").

The dream might even be over. Or we might delude ourselves that it is. In the end, what matters is not trying to dodge the Apocalypse, but playing along without expecting to win it. The presumption of good could nullify as much as the banality of evil. And Liars, once again, prove they are well aware of it.

WIXIW (2012), the sixth studio album for Mute, conceived in a non-place isolated from urban delirium — almost as if to take distance from it and study it more dispassionately — and recorded in Los Angeles, confirms the band's ability to change form without altering too much the substance of what has always remained an obscure post-Apocalypse poetics. Dissecting the album's skeleton, one immediately perceives a privileged use of electronics, which this time becomes a fundamental matrix, increasingly close to the mood of the most recent Thom Yorke & co., at times in a thicker, sharper, more pained contrast of tension and drive ("No. 1 Against The Rush"), in other cases apparently closer to that ethereal pace, before revealing a far heavier gravitational pull ("Who Is The Hunter"), up to opening into a lighter, kindred texture ("His And Mine Sensations"). If the primordial experience of Liars sinks its roots into a prolonged series of aftershocks following the peak of the no-wave scale, the years since their debut dredge up the murk of the darkest post-punk, aided by the co-production of Daniel Miller, Mute's historic founder, who raises the panic all the way to the anguished memory of Johnny Rotten's evil grin inside the precious metal box ("A Ring On Every Finger", "Brats").

Their fidelity to themselves remains unchanged, and blurred memories of the old, viscerally cathartic and alienating mood à-la-Drum's Not Dead resurface to reassert their historic importance ("Octagon"). Despite the tensional release, in the title track the hunger for air never passes and expands into a confused, enveloping circular nightmare, marked by a fragile mantra, epically intoned by the tolling of the cymbals. The unease of stillness — since no stillness is ever truly such — brings down the curtain on what is not an ending, but yet another enigmatic suggestion ("Annual Moon Words"). A desolate fragility permeates the entire album, and having set aside the sabbaths and monotone obsessions, it is perhaps, as never before, bare, offering the listener the chance to take refuge in the corners of a complex and seductive mental architecture.

In recent years, then, Liars have progressively moved closer to an electronic structure indebted both to the synth-punk of Suicide and to the dance rhythms of 90s EBM that sparked such excitement in the vaguely dark clubs of that era, as well as, of course, techno and in part house.

Mess (2014) is the inexorable, definitive arrival at this style, a personal and further definition of punk. The Los Angeles band's new work plays at being a dance album without ever fully being one, shuffling the deck by throwing in distorted versions of synth-pop, techno and electronics in general. Versions of Depeche Mode stuffed with anxiolytics surface in the most "pop" moments (the lead single "Mess On A Mission", the sharp blasts of "Vox Tuned D.E.D"), techno transfigurations shuffle the cards veering toward shores never before explored by the band (both "Darkside" and "Mask Maker" recall The Architect), while the distinctly EBM references give an example of what the word dance means for Liars (the circular synth loops of "I'm No Gold", the stasis and implosions of "Pro Anti Anti"). The strongly experimental vein of music born from the "liars" remains in the broken-up notes holding up the arduous "Can't Hear Well", in the delirious and pained sonorities of the lengthy "Perpetual Village", as well as in the closing "Left Speaker Blown", nine minutes of sick catharsis, a purifying descent into hell, the perfect accomplishment that manages to simultaneously throw open the doors to the new while remaining faithful to the past. After years of clattering guitars and relentless drumming, perhaps the path of electronics could be fresh lifeblood for a band that has never been tamed and is always ready to surprise.

In 2014 drummer Julian Gross decided to leave the band. Shortly after, Aaron Hemphill made the same decision. This second split in particular deeply affected Angus Andrew, who decided to carry on the adventure in complete solitude, taking refuge in a remote cabin in his native Australia, seeking inspiration in isolation from the glittering clamor of New York, Los Angeles and Berlin, the cities that had been at the center of his interests for so many fruitful years. Andrew poured all his demons into music, and the result is TFCF (an acronym for "Theme For Crying Fountain"), which thus becomes his first solo experiment. Released at the end of August 2017, the eighth Liars chapter oozes suffering from every pore, and represents the courageous choice not to give up the historic band name, winning the bet of continuing to astonish, even alone, veering away from the purely electronic direction taken on the previous two records. Opting for a form of avant-garde rock unlike anything done before, he managed to draw compositional strength from the negative events of recent months, transforming distress into eleven tracks in which he embraced a skewed singer-songwriter sentimentalism, often centered on the unexpected use of acoustic guitar, while somehow remaining tied to the band's path, between synthetic beats ("Staring At Zero") and never-conventional structures. The acoustic approach — always suitably disturbed — is evident from the very first notes of the opening "The Grand Delusional", eloquent in showing the distress over a broken artistic relationship. A guitar, treated vocals, electro beats arriving halfway through the track, the lo-fi aesthetic — the same traits reappear in the following "Cliché Suite", seasoned with melancholic spanish atmospheres, and a little further on in "No Help Pamphlet", close to the Conor Oberst of "Digital Ash In A Digital Urn".

Another defining feature of TFCF is the heavy use of field recordings, nature sounds and assorted noises captured during the recording sessions by leaving a microphone running in the forest next to the studio. The results can be traced particularly in the opening sections of "Face To Face With My Face" and "Emblems Of Another Story", and in the ambient closer "Crying Fountain", a mournful farewell, a funeral procession that marks the definitive end of a long existential chapter. Everything feels disorienting, jagged, torn apart and stitched back together, heavily manipulated in the studio, with atmospheres that become almost dramatic on "Ripe Ripe Rot", almost a glance toward the latest, shattered Nick Cave. But self-imposed isolation also gives rise to flashes of dissonant "pop", concentrated after the album's midpoint, where "No Tree No Branch", the lo-fi electronics of "Cred Woes" (almost an outtake from the previous record) and the rhythm of "Coins At My Caged Fist" offer some breathing room, letting in a few shafts of light. The surviving "Liar" also manages to give himself the satisfaction of publicly sending those directly concerned the snapshot of the wedding dress immortalized on the cover, which he intends as a depiction of being left at the altar. TFCF thus becomes the new fixed point from which to set off toward new future designs, a transition toward wonderfully unaligned new free form songs.

After a full eighteen years of distinguished career, they try their hand at a soundtrack with 1/1, the first film by director Jeremy Phillips, the sad story of a young woman tormented by existential troubles, drugs and excess of every kind. A story of modernity, then, a malaise born of its opposite, the "wellbeing" of American opulence. Recorded shortly after the release of "Mess" (2014), Liars (here reduced to a duo, Angus Andrew and Aaron Hemphill) commit firmly to an electronic soundtrack, with persistent dubstep leanings in search of neurotic rhythms and claustrophobic atmospheres that often amount to mere sketches. Pulsing d'n'b beats ("Cottagevej"), glitch textures ("Caused By The Glitch"), industrial scenarios ("The Jelling Ship"), follow one another in sequence to fit the film's images. "Helsingor Lane", a hypnotic chant amid swarms of guitars, piano, spectral vocals and distorted horns, returns to the "old" Liars of "Drum's Not Dead" and represents the most moving moment of 1/1, alongside the relentless drone of "Telepathic Interrogation", which recalls the soundtrack work of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and the anguished manipulations of "Shitraver". The soundtrack venture is an experiment for the New York band, an experiment in which — when all is said and done — nothing much is actually experimented with; probably a pleasant but transitional record, a placeholder ahead of a new future work.

Titles With The Word Fountain (2018) shows, from its title alone, a continuity with TFCF, with a tracklist of no fewer than seventeen songs that might maliciously suggest mere leftovers from the previous record. Nothing could be further from the truth; if one tries to think of it as a single long piece, the whole album takes on far nobler meaning. No longer small few-minute sketches of ideas, but one long sonic flow made of suffering and tragedy, where the irony of the cover art and of the live shows (for those lucky enough to have seen them) is submerged beneath macabre synths and sighed vocals ("Feed Truth"), continuous field recordings, bird shrieks and bizarre Residents-like keyboards ("Fantail Creeps"). In a sense it's their own "The Faust Tapes", the sprawling grab-bag album. Everything is one big cauldron of new and not-so-new ideas, thrown together almost haphazardly, constantly searching for a thread of continuity, like a solitary, Freudian stream of consciousness in the style of James Joyce, one steeped in inner struggle and self-dialogue. In its strangeness, Titles With The Word Fountain is a sincere attempt at making authentic art, to be praised and appreciated regardless of the result achieved.

Angus Andrew ventures into dark places thick with lyricism and echoes on The Apple Drop (2021), further shuffling the deck with the (history of) avant-garde music. On this visionary tenth chapter of the Liars saga, his computer-generated fantasies and vocal architectures are made tactile and concrete by avant-jazz drummer Laurence Pike (Triosk, Pivot/PVT, Szun Waves) and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell (Streets of Laredo, Sia), while poet Mary Pearson Andrew (High Places), Andrew's real-life partner, co-writes the lyrics.

The Apple Drop is a maximalist album, classic and retro-futurist. It's progressive, avant-garde, symbolist and psychedelic. It contains everything that came before it and, at the same time, everything that surpasses it, shaped by robust, eclectic songwriting. "Sekwar" wouldn't have been out of place on "WXIXW" (Mute, 2012), yet inside its electronic sounds pulse the Swans. So in every track where we think we recognize something familiar, there's a twist: the gospel finale of "Star Search", the à la Radiohead arpeggio of "In Rainbows" (XL, 2007) on "From What The Never Was", the astral interference beamed in from the planet of Sun Ra on the oblique garage-rock of "My Pulse To Ponder", the keyboard flourishes in full-on Bjork-like vertigo on the electro post-punk of "Leisure War", the '70s pop sheen of the dream ballad "King of the Crooks", the gothic sway of "Acid Cross" with its calibrated excesses of vocal manipulation.

Contributions by Alessandro Biancalana ("Mess"), Claudio Lancia ("TFCF"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("1/1" and "Theme From Crying Fountain"), Maria Teresa Soldani ("The Apple Drop")

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