Liars have been one of the 21st century’s most confounding and consistent bands because they make two kinds of albums: ones where they don’t know what they’re doing, and ones where they’ve figured it out. Since arriving in 2001 as inside operatives bent on dance-punk’s destruction, their career has alternated bizarre and divisive left turns with records that vindicated their artistic vision. This risk/reward dynamic is even more pronounced with the release of their seventh album, Mess. The sleek contours of 2012’s WIXIW betrayed Liars’ self-admission that they were learning how to use computers and sequencers on the fly, downplaying the extreme shift from the caveman garage rock and scabrous art-punk of Liars and Sisterworld. And now Mess feels like Liars getting their driver’s license after fumbling with a learner’s permit—you can have a lot more fun with this machinery once you stop worrying about totaling the thing.
If you didn’t care for WIXIW’s muted introspection, Mess is a welcome counterpoint; the dance-punk throwback “Brats” was tacked onto WIXIW seemingly as a random addendum, but Liars have a way of using late-album cuts as foreshadowing. And in fact Mess is the first Liars album that could be given a “dance-” hyphenate since their debut. As with They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, it’s physical, bodymoving music for people who don’t have much interest in proper dance music. A pitch-shifted Angus Andrew begins Mess demanding to be depantsed (as well as “eat my socks”), and after the pummeling beat of “Mask Maker” drops, it could be heard as an alternate history, one in which Liars continued on the path of electroclash subversives.
Liars have never been futurists, and a curious byproduct of their electronic shift is how it’s made them strangely retro. Their previous record’s clicks and whirs hearkened back to early 2000s IDM and lap-pop such as the Notwist and Dntel, where the first half of Mess takes its cues from the festival-EDM that was thoroughly trendpieced around the time of WIXIW—Hoovering bass, crowd-pleasing drops, air raid synth lines. Mess bangs from the start, albeit in a way that tends to flatten out the dynamics, as the introductory duo of “Mask Masker” and “Vox Tuned D.E.D.” could be mistaken for an eight-minute suite, a fairly predictable means of expressing their past physicality in an electronic setting. The relatively quieter moments are where Liars show their newfound confidence and instrumental facility: an organ break reminiscent of OutKast’s “Ghettomusick” pierces through “Pro Anti Anti”, while the frazzled, free-time “Can’t Hear Well” hints towards the second half’s turn towards more abstract composition.
Mess turns out to be an admirably diverse album that foregrounds the big-beat material: “Darkslide” and “Boyzone” find Liars imposing their will on electronic music rather than the other way around, the tribal rhythms and perverted vocals of Drum’s Not Dead updated with fancier software. The closers “Perpetual Village” and “Left Speaker Blown” actually revisit the unsettling atmosphere of They Were Wrong So We Drowned and contain some of Andrew’s most evocative lyrics if you can manage to suss them out. But at a combined 16 minutes of slow-moving murk and half-illegible, half-inaudible vocals, they’re more exciting as clues towards speculating Liars’ next move than they are in the present moment.
Which at least cuts against the narrative that Mess is a fully-realized mission statement; Andrew confessed to being riddled with spiritual and artistic doubt throughout WIXIW, but Mess is far more dilettantish and can register as being every bit as cynical as the murderous, anti-Los Angeles screed Sisterworld. At points, Andrew confesses “I am old/ Endless monotony dulls all alternatives/ Life is long, way too long” and “I heard the wild world is wicked/ And the modern one is out for blood.”
Seven albums in, the respectable qualities of Liars’ music have been well-documented, but it’s worth asking: do they make moving, ingratiating music or simply admirable art? Does anything on Mess have the capacity to inspire emotional investment? Does any of it stick with you? Or, more importantly, where is the Liars-ness in Mess? Mostly, it comes from Andrew’s voice, still intimidating in its lowest registers and frightening when given to wraith-like moans; we get both modes during obvious highlight “Mess On a Mission”. But it’s been 10 years since Liars were notoriously and short-sightedly called “unlistenable” by major publications. In 2014, Mess might be called "challenging" out of habit, but is anything here capable of scaring off the squares?
In fact, Mess can sound pretty tame compared to electronic acts which can be linked to their ultra-percussive, post-punk aesthetics such as Factory Floor or Fuck Buttons. As enjoyable as it can be, Mess is a centrist record from a band without a lot of centrist strengths and appreciating it can feel like a symbolic gesture: it’s easy to support a band who’s achieved their level of success while making conceivably challenging music. In other words, it’s easy to admire because Liars are easy to admire.
