Liars have always been a truly scary band - and I don't mean Alice Cooper scary. Their first album, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top was frightening not only because of its title, but because it injected a heavy dose of deep, dark psychosis into the post-punk trend that, in 2001, was already sounding the charge for early-00s "rock revival" (The Rapture, Radio 4, Interpol, and all their British and American offspring). Right off the bat, it was clear that Liars didn't give a fuck about any sort of revival: for them, rock and roll was already a diseased, sore-infested corpse they were anxious to beat and trample. Which they gleefully continued to do with They Were Wrong So We Drowned, a bad-trip noise record conceptualized around New Jersey's witch trial history, and recorded in the woods with production guru David Sitek; the album was so full of jolting screeches and jarring, angular rhythms that it took a lot of sunlight and a few whisky shots to sit through its full 40 minutes without running for the door.
In 2006 came Liars' weakest album, Drum's Not Dead, in which they tried to show the world that they weren't so dark, and could be trippin' hippies too. Sadly, the album was still too full of sonic torture and twisted experimentation for us to believe that the drugs passing around weren't dreadfully bad. Their 2007 eponymous album was something of a breather, for Liars and for the listeners who had stuck with the band over the course of their career. The record combined relatively traditional sounds and song structures with the band's noisy penchants and characteristic, charcoal-black atmospherics. What it lacked in explicit insanity, it made up for in brooding rage. Sisterworld, Liars' 2010 release, follows much of the same path, but goes far beyond its predecessor's achievements, in terms of subtlety, songwriting, and, well, terror.
Although opening track "Scissor" breaks from restrained, disquieting harmonies into a sudden, fuzzed-out romp about halfway through the song, actual noise makes itself relatively scarce on the album (there's demented, homicidal biker-punk on "Scarecrows on a Killer Slant," the nightmarish end to "I Can Still See the Outside," and epileptic head-banging on "The Overachievers" - but that's about it). Like The Horrors on last year's Primary Colors, Liars seem to have learned that quiet(er) and creepy can be far more effective than howling and loud playin'. And like their British cousins, Liars have focused Sisterworld on gloomy ambiances, in which somber industrial sounds blend with trailing guitars, repetitive rhythms, evocative synths and even, at times, strings and horns ("Goodbye Everything"). Angus Andrew's singing takes more melodic and varied disguises, sounding at times almost like a pre-pubescent Tom Waits ("No Barrier Fun"), and on "The Overachievers" like a less lethargic Kurt Cobain. But it's in the songs themselves that you can hear the the band's real improvement: more focused, more carefully built, each track is its own, autonomous and accessible universe.
But accessible doesn't mean reassuring. Sisterworld is arguably Liars' scariest album, precisely because the dread lies hidden in the album's tense restraint. The record isn't American Psycho scary, it's Shock Corridor scary: beneath its murmured lullabies and whispered chants, you discern worlds of folly and distress. When Andrew sings, "Carry victims one by one," on "Here Comes All the People," your blood runs cold as a refrigerator. Similarly, "No Barrier Fun"'s eerie xylophone jingle and insistent violin evoke strange shadows in an empty house. Like getting up to pee at five in the morning and finding your older brother alone in the hallway, muttering to himself in the bleak half-light...
Liars, Sisterworld
Mute, 2010
FC
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