A Liars Version of a Pop Album
Immediate and visceral. This is the type of response Angus Andrew, vocalist and guitarist for post-art-punk experimentalists Liars, wants listeners of the trios latest album to experience.
And hes recently been dealing with something else immediate and visceralthe pain in his back. When I reach him on the phone, hes in a van on his way from Los Angeles to San Francisco for Liars first show in a month-long cross-country tour and sounds a bit amused (and understandably frustrated) by his predicament. The previous week, while grabbing a pillow from his couch, he threw his lower back so out of whack that he was virtually immobilized.
I think its offering a new and interesting challenge for performing .No high kicks, not even any low kicks, he says, laughing. People will be able to enjoy my wide vocal range since Im not trying to do back flips.
Although hes joking about the breadth of his vocal abilities, the styles he employs on Liars, the groups fourth full-length disc (released in August 2007), run the gamut: from a full-volume yowl on the grinding guitar assault Plaster Casts of Everything to a falsetto weaving in and out of the beats on the bouncy, fuzzed-out Houseclouds to his almost monotone drone on What Would They Know.
Andrew abundantly demonstrates his vocal dexterity, and his multiplicity of approaches accentuates the dramatic sonic shifts on Liars, which, unlike the past two releases, has no unifying concept at its core.
Its very uncohesive, Andrew admits. But early on, we decided that was OK for us.
Before they started writing songs for the album, Andrew, who was living in Berlin, and Aaron Hemphill (percussion, guitar and synth), whos based in Los Angeles, talked briefly about their ideas, but they quickly decided to leave the process open ended and simply look to the music they grew up on for inspiration.
We started to think about how music affected us when we were younger and a bit less jaded, he says. We were looking for that universal quality that possibly weve been lacking because weve been so finite about our concepts and intentions.
And although from listening to Liars you might imagine he turned to a collection of early post-punk, garage and electronic innovators, Andrew was listening to anything but.
Instead, Andrew rattles off a scattershot list, beginning with early 1980s Michael Jackson, Madonna, George Michael and Prince, moving to seminal hip-hop groups like N.W.A. and Public Enemy, turning to early 90s grunge bands like Alice in Chains and Nirvana and ending with the trip-hop of Tricky and Portishead.
With these references as starting points, Andrew and his bandmates created 11 spectacularly different tracks that can stand alone but also hang together as a group, sounding nothing like the bands Andrew mentionsunless they were heavily distorted and sent through a dozen filters.
Its Liars version of a pop album. And Andrew hopes that listeners are able to absorb and digest these songs on their own more than in the past because Liars avoided attaching any particular idea to the album as a whole.
In a lot of ways this was a very sort of traditional record, Andrew says, explaining that they were using instruments the way they were supposed to be used, working in a verse/chorus/verse structure and singing lyrics that are somewhat intelligible.
But in a lot of ways it ended up being our most experimental because we were using elements we hadnt used before.
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