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LiarsThey Were Wrong, So We Drowned Mute/EMI Back when Liars were a quartet they closed their first record with This Dust Makes That Mud, a thick dirge longer than the album’s preceding eight songs. The song and the band were labeled weird; it wasn’t the danceable art punk people wanted Liars to do. Freeze. New scenario: singer Angus Andrew and guitarist Aaron Hemphill trade their rhythm section for drummer Julian Gross. Andrew leaves his Brooklyn apartment for a house steeped in the woods of New Jersey. Liars record ‘They Were Wrong, So We Drowned’, a thematic collection of songs about witchcraft, over two months, isolated in those very woods. The result is a brainfucking mess of tribal drums, hordes of loops, effects and interference and Andrew’s distinctive foaming voice. It both surpasses all of their previous output and is the marker for their new direction. Liars are dead. Liars are reborn. Broken Witch opens with errant robotic breaths and bloops before Hemphill introduces a spindly guitar and Gross bangs out a motorik rhythm. When the studio experimentation mangles and spits out a new drumbeat, the trio get really nasty. There are several spectres in the detail; behind the drums hover guitars and electronics treated so as to resemble cries of death. Andrew ends the song repeating the word "blood." It appears the band is both hungry for it and spilling it at the same time. There’s Always Room On The Broom may have a disco drum line but Hemphill’s overcharged muddy guitar drills over Andrew’s upper register. The centrepiece is the skeletal We Fenced Our Houses With The Bones Of Our Own. Gross’ mechanised drums cough and splutter as Hemphill and Andrew build static-drenched voodoo and a mesmeric vocal. Just as Matmos have gone folkloric with their electronics, Liars have deconstructed themselves and re-emerged as a supernatural soul noise band. They Don’t Want Your Corn They Want Your Kids employs a sort of spaced-out funk with swooping demons hiding in Andrew’s "Mama, I’m selling my blood." Read The Book That Wrote Itself is a storm pissing on a ritual. Swirls of thunderous noise bruise a simple circular drum pattern and random hiss and crackle. Two more songs of rabid shamanistic deconstruction make way for the closing Flow My Tears The Spider Said, a nursery rhyme that ends with the sound of birds and a dense overhanging dread. ‘They Were Wrong, So We Drowned’ sounds just like it was recorded in a secluded house buried in the forest. Liars have become one with their overgrown moonlit surroundings and developed some suitably macabre textures and structures, both musical and production-wise. This is a boldly unrepentant work that captures a band at a most exciting point in their musical evolution. |
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