Liars preview

Liars
Aragon, Chicago
Thursday, October 11, 2007

During a post-millennial upsurge in one-word band names, “Liars” seemed as innocuous as any other. In retrospect it looks like a plan.

Not specifically as lying or fabrication, but certainly deception. Liars have changed so dramatically with each album, it’d be worth questioning if they’re always the same band if we didn’t have the luxury of liner notes and live performances. Somewhere in central Kansas there’s a kid with a Kazaa account and a Sputnik-sized confusion.

Now on their fourth album — which, maybe as a joke, is self-titled — Liars make an attempt to kind of return to rock ‘n’ roll, not that it was ever their forte. Last year’s Drum’s Not Dead (Mute) was recorded in Berlin and came off like Soviet-era architecture: harrowing and bleak, but ultimately unsatisfying and sterile. Its concept was more interesting than its execution, and overall Drum’s was trying to make us to take Liars more seriously.

Liars is also deliberately obstinate, but it also doesn’t come off like a forced abandonment of a prior identity. It’s psychedelic in a way only art punks can be psychedelic. Damaged industrial like “Leather Prowler” returns to Germany and invokes the patience-trying antics of Einsturzende Neubauten or England’s Throbbing Gristle, but as the chanting and racket head toward a denouement it’s as if everyone’s smiling.

More shocking are “Plaster Casts Of Everything” (which hearkens back to their shock-therapy debut), the acid rock of “Cycle Time,” and “Freak Out” and “Pure Unevil,” which could be Jesus & Mary Chain demos circa Psychocandy. Their time away from such straightforwardness since, well, the beginning, has disguised an amazingly versatile band.

Liars open for Interpol.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly