These guys eat ground glass. They're that nasty. You may like their music, but don't forget that they hate you. You didn't do anything; they're just sick of your bullshit. And what're you gonna say back? The singer's a towering, lanky Australian named Angus-- that's Scottish for "Bubba"-- and the music's a gray nightmare of art-punk and noisy beats. It's vicious, but you can dance to it!
No matter how much buzz they draw-- appearing on the John Peel show, touring with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, having their debut re-released on Blast First-- the Liars will stay hostile and insidious. They make what I can only describe as cyborg junkyard rock. Guitarist Angus Hempell plays messy power chords and high-pitched, lobotomizingly zen-like guitar lines, but he also has a drum machine: dig "Mr. You're on Fire Mr.," where he sticks programmed fills where you'd expect guitar riffs. The lo-fi electronics and sound effects that pervade the album give it a rhythmic kick, but while other artists try to make samples sound human, the Liars work to sound hypnotically mechanical. On "Nothing Is Ever Lost or Can Be," they lurch and march-step to jerky high notes and tumbling drum fills.
Angus Andrews is impenetrable, showing the emotional range of a matchbook: he's either flat or flared. His sing/shouting switches from weary to angry and back again, and just try to make sense of the splintered, hostile lyrics he spits like rat poison: "They cut me up they cut me up they cut me up they cut me up they cut me up at the medical school."
It's up to bassist Pat Nature and Ron Albertson on "friendly drums" to reign in the noise, and Nature puts all the torque into the band: listen to "We Live NE of Compton," where the bassline kicks it into a killer dance-punk number; and to see his modest side, check out how his steady rumble keeps "Loose Nuts on the Veladrome" together while the rest of the band buzzes off in every direction. He's the reason it's impossible to write about this band without comparing them to Gang of Four-- that post-punk tendency to impale rage and noise on the sharp edge of a floor-beating rhythm.
But sticking with that would be too easy. Every time the Liars bust out a stone-cold party favorite, they answer it with a track that feels like sticking your head in a vice. "Tumbling Walls Buried Me in Debris" is disorientingly repetitive, with a sinking, introverted melody, zen-like chimes and an eerie beat that sounds like the delusion-sequence music from a P.O.W. film: Charlie's got us gagged and bound and tortured, and nobody gets out of here without a migraine.
I've played They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top a dozen times in the last couple days, and I get something different each time. Sometimes I find new sounds; sometimes I feel like I get less out of it with every listen. It's not clear where their tactics are going, whether it'll come together on the next album, or whether this fragmented style is the thing that makes them great. In fact, all that is clear is that it's rare that a band rocks this hard and still challenges you at every turn.
The last track is the final showdown. "This Dirt Makes Mud" is a drawn-out slide of grinding, throbbing rock with Andrews moaning and shouting while Hempell squeaks and squalls and Nature rumbles menacingly underneath. In direct opposition to the brief songs on the rest of the album, this is a rock epic, but here's the trick: the music doesn't stop. At roughly the moment any other song here would end, the band fades into a four-second loop, and once the machine's going, they take off and get a beer while it plays over, and over, and over, for more than twenty minutes. You can leave whenever you want, but then you're quitting before the album does. Maybe this is a statement, maybe they're killing time, and maybe it's just the sound of a band crawling up its own ass. But when's the last time a record dared you to blink first?
