Liars set controls for the heart of Ra

Amid many sayings attributed to Andy Warhol one is mind-engraved in particular: ‘Art is what you can get away with.” If that were true one might argue that pop music is the greatest artform, because it gets away with chronic puke! Well, the late Andy didn’t mean it thatta way, an increase in mediocrity quotient, he pointed to a creative challenge, pushing the norm deeper, surveying more (by inventing or kitsch-ing in his case) and serving a polemic.

In musical term’s we’d be talking about bands like Can, Public Image Ltd, Gang Of Four, The Fall, King Crimson, Magazine, The Birthday Party – names you’ve heard already but few of the modern artist take any notice. Now adding Liars and its ‘They Threw Us All In a Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top’… It’s is far too handier to get into The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Nirvana, Korn, Limp Bizkit… There is too much copyism, too little invention, too few new ideas… We all love certain things, get obsessed with them but – what’s the point in exploring the charted?

Liars are different but not alien with music that, from the green-light, refuses to obey by the rules of any kind. In the fusion chamber we have elements even the ‘Naked Chef’ would have a problem to turn into a TV prog. Liars make music that is saying – ‘I’m not trying to impress you’ or, as singer … put it, “We’re not writing songs for people to sing along.”

Well, you can do something better with this disc: you can live it. Each track can be applied to a certain function, be it simple ‘mating-dance’, cooking, grass gathering or sex, baby! In its stripped, basic, primitive, biologically primed duty, it simply takes you places to face yourself: ‘Grown Men Don’t Fall In The River, Just Like That’ is a wake-up call in The Fall mode, ‘Nothing Is Ever Lost Or Can Be Lost My Science Friend’ is baby-making track, ‘We Live NE Of Compton’ is urbanity disturbed, an uprising ‘hood, ‘This Dust Makes That Mud’ is reality deconstructed to its sub-level, a trip-o-rama of visual-inducing content.

The last is the final track, lasting 30 minutes, that concludes with a loopage that takes you through the doors of perception, beyond the event horizon, into the long dark night which we all avoid, not to travel across the Ignoramix. Pink robot’s sonic mosaic of jewellery of precious references, delightfully invigorating, deeply cathartic… Set on Repeat.

Three valiant albums have been released in a short succession over the summer: ‘The Coral’ by The Coral, the Liars’ disc and ‘The Music’ by The Music; it’s been an A1 month.

8.8/10