Even at their highest points of visibility, Liars have spent the last decade creating obfuscation. Their 2001 debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, was a raging fire of herky-jerky Solid Gold antagonism that ended a locked groove which, on CD, ran longer than all of the record's songs combined. The lead single from 2006's Drum's Not Dead, "It Fit When I Was a Kid", featured the unconflicted cover image of the trio's faces superimposed onto gay pornography. Liars have shifted around geographically over the years as well, from New York to New Jersey to Berlin, but since settling down in Los Angeles in 2009, they've made some of their most unsettling and misanthropic work thus far.
The band's latest curveball arrives early on their latest album, WIXIW. Its opening track, "The Exact Colour of Doubt", features Tangerine Dream-like synths giving way to soft pitter-patter percussion and a guitar line that shimmers with just the right amount of reverb. It's lovely, ethereal, and not remotely indicative of what follows.
WIXIW is a return to Liars' more adventurous, experimental roots, a dark and abstract detour from the more straightforward one-two punch of 2007's self-titled effort and 2010's Sisterworld. While the latter showcased comparatively traditional instrumentation, WIXIW is largely electronic and sample-based, with frontman Angus Andrew's vocals featuring as one of very few recognizably organic presences on the record. The trait this album shares most with its predecessor is an abundance of creeping tension, but there's little catharsis to be found here, just a steady level of overcast unease.
Liars have always excelled at creating self-contained atmospheres and the overall vibe on WIXIW is pure dread and uncertainty, no doubt a by-product of the album's genesis. Andrew mentioned in our interview that the creative process was "more difficult" than in the past, a result of he and band member Aaron Hemphill's increasingly collaborative songwriting. The strengthened partnership between the two is apparent, to the point where Andrew appears to address Hemphill directly on the cosmic rumination "His and Mine Sensations": "Tell me it's a lie, Aaron/ Tell me it's a lie."
While making the album, Andrew also began a serious romantic relationship while a relationship of Hemphill's ended. WIXIW finds itself emotionally and lyrically somewhere in the middle, mixing bitter sentiments and pleas for protection and safety with the same embrace of duality that marked Drum's Not Dead. The new album's title is pronounced "wish you," and the harrowing upward climb of its title track and centerpiece reflects the type of yearning that the pronunciation suggests: "I wish you were here with me/ I can't no longer take it all/ Wish you would not come back to me."
WIXIW is a very human and fragile album-- moreso than any other Liars record-- and it's initially easy to overlook these traits because the sound is so cold, electronic, and distant. It's so clearly the result of a rock band attempting to create electronic music that comparisons to Radiohead circa Kid A and Amnesiac are somewhat unavoidable. (Andrew's decidedly Thom Yorke-ish vocal takes on "His and Mine Sensations" and "III Valley Prodigies" add some weight to that, too.) But where Radiohead drew from the then-contemporary glitch of Warp-stamped IDM, Liars look further back on WIXIW, evoking an earlier period of electronic music.
That nod to the distant past is represented in the choice to bring in Mute founder and producer Daniel Miller (Depeche Mode, Yazoo) as a co-producer along with the band themselves, as well as in Liars' own rudimentary, back-to-basics sampling techniques, where they recorded dripping wet rags and deflated balloons, among other things. (You can find videos documenting these sampling techniques at the band's website.) As a result, even WIXIW's most inhuman moments retain a force of brute, blunt physicality. Take Liars' drums away and leave them with nothing but machines, and they still project an incantatory, campfire-seance vibe.
Appreciating WIXIW's taken risks and the subsequent riches that follow is a lot easier of a task than deciding where it ranks on the best-to-least-best scale of Liars' records. I'm fairly certain it's not their best, but even as I type this, each spin brings out new details and textures that color the listening experience in a different way. What we end up with is another very good album from a band that consistently turns out good work while charting its own path. Fascinating turns of change have always been Liars' sole consistency, and in that respect, I hope they stay the same forever.
