If there’s one thing you can say about Liars, it’s that they’ve never had any trouble finding their voice. Though their catalogue includes three full-length albums and numerous EPs from punk to dance rock to tribal psychedelic, each release was stamped by that undeniable Liars aesthetic ““ that immeasurable confidence that made every new step a success.
Nowhere is this sense of identity more alive and well than on “Liars,” the enigmatic trio’s fourth studio album. Following last year’s conceptually concise “Drum’s Not Dead,” “Liars” rarely remains in the same genre for more than a track or two, resulting in a less uniform listening experience, but affirming what most listeners have known all along: The only uniformity necessary is the presence of Liars themselves.
Evidence of this appears in the album’s first few seconds. “Plaster Casts of Everything” begins with a guitar riff sharp enough to shave your face with before singer Angus Andrew begins to howl “I wanna run away/I wanna bring you too” in his most urgent falsetto. Still dazed from the punch of the first song, the listener is sent headfirst into a synth-driven track that could have been cowritten by Beck. Three minutes later and “Leather Prowler” begins, which could have easily been included on the sound track of a low-budget horror movie and made it infinitely more convincing. Following that is “Sailing to Byzantium,” which hearkens back to ’80s down-tempo dance rock without the miserable self-parody.
The pace is maintained throughout the whole record, never allowing the listener a chance to get comfortable, or for that matter, bored. “What Would They Know” conjures up associations with the No Wave movement and “Freak Out” will remind some of the muffled shoegaze of The Jesus and Mary Chain. “Clear Island” sounds like it could have been on the first Liars album (“They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top”), while “Cycle Time” is home to one of Andrew’s most soulful vocal performances.
Identifying exactly what unites these tracks together and how they successfully inhabit the same album is difficult. It could be Liars’ signature style of recording, which includes a swamp of reverb, plenty of delay, and at least a little chaos. It could be Andrew’s delivery, which is always delightfully visceral but often flirts with sour notes. It could be their relentless quest to never do the same thing twice.
But regardless of what it is, the mysterious spirit of Liars makes the self-titled album an exciting listen. Though it may not hold up to their near-masterpiece, “Drum’s Not Dead,” it is nevertheless home to their most definitive statement of identity: that of a band bold enough to genre-hop from one song to the next without ever conceding a part of their utter singularity.
E-mail Phuong at tphuong@media.ucla.edu and Duhamel at dduhamel@media.ucla.edu.