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The re-formed Humanoids remain hell bent for leather

Music Features

Drums and wires

ON THE COUCH: “I’m willing to risk whatever,” says Angus Andrew, “even if I have to explain myself again and again.”

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.”