ON THE COUCH: “I’m willing to risk whatever,” says Angus Andrew, “even if I have to explain myself again and again.” |
Angus Andrew — the conceptual heart of Liars (who headline the Paradise this Friday) — sits in an Atlanta cybercafé, wearing a playful, sparkly kitty-cat T-shirt and squirming uncomfortably. Before long, the impossibly lanky frontman slumps down to eye level and sinks into the couch, as if steeled to undergo a psychiatric evaluation — surely not for the first time.Interviews for Andrew are like sessions on the couch. He’s been questioned nearly to death about Liars’ new Drum’s Not Dead (Mute). The follow-up to their 2004 album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned (Mute), it’s received mixed reviews and prompted Chinese whispers about him as “just someone who takes a lot of drugs and tries to be conceptually abnormal.” Of course, when a band evolve from the neo-new-wave Factory-twunk-meets-Triborough-funk of a debut album that was at the vanguard of a scene then coalescing in Brooklyn to a high-concept disc full of electronically manipulated ritualistic polyrhythms and German fairy tales and then moves on to a disc with fictional characters who embody the self-doubt of the creative process, a degree of public bewilderment is to be expected.
It was a taut but approachable 2001 debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top (reissued by Mute in 2002), that made its follow-up, the phantasmagoric They Were Wrong, seem “difficult.” What it takes to understand these reformed/deformed “dance-punks” — Andrew (guitar/programming/vocals), Aaron Hemphill (guitarist/”frequency usurper”), and Julian Gross (drums/”visual coordinator”) — is context, or the intentional lack thereof.
Andrew was born in the Philippines and moved frequently between cities in Australia. Permanence is, to him, an alien state. So though Liars formed in the hip epicenter of Brooklyn, Andrew has of late flourished in the bohemianism of Berlin. “Every few years I like to plop myself somewhere I don’t exist yet, because it’s too easy to define and limit yourself in a place you’ve been. Plus, it might be that I was never around people long enough to gain acknowledgment that I’d achieved something, so I never had much confidence in my technical ability.”
Whatever the reason, Liars explore experimental concepts and then move onto the next idea without waiting for the ink to dry on the cover art. Live they’ve always been a frenzied experience, but they’ve grown more perversely inward and claustrophobic. Instead of two guitarists, they’ll use a pair of drum kits to build to an unswerving krautrock beat. On Drum’s Not Dead — which is accompanied by a surround-sound DVD with three abstract video clips for every song directed by all three members — they embraced not only more uncertainty but also more immediacy. “I was a bit upset by how difficult apparently it was to hear Drowned, and I wanted to give people a chance to get in there,” Andrew admits. “So in a lot of ways the tense-release sequencing [of Drum’s] put songs in between each other with concern for allowing the listener into the record.”
Drum’s is a more complete album than Drowned, with the same fevered, effects-laden core but more accessible hooks. “I really hate the idea some people have, which seems to be we’re intentionally trying to alienate our audience or something. I just think people are more intelligent than they are given credit for, and it doesn’t freak people out that much if we change context. I feel we’re a truthful band and there will be people happy to take it in even if we brave opening up our guts for our version of ‘pop.’ I’m willing to risk whatever, even if I have to explain myself again and again.”
LIARS + APES | June 23 | Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | 617.228.6000
On the Web
Liars: //www.liarsliarsliars.com/
