Liars - the future’s milestone, now

Singer‘s long, lean frame, dressed in a white nurse’s uniform, is crouched over his noise-box that is positioned near the mike stand; the guitarist/percussionist/SFX-operator has his back turned to the audience and drummer is dressed in some Flintstones’ chic that would make Jane Jungle ask if Tarzan had seen D&G… The song that opens the show is a cavalcade of controlled noise that are equally psychedelic-electro-avant-hard…

Liars, the New York leaders of art-rock, are in town to present their version of what rock music should be: brave, forward-looking, exciting, spiritual, inspirational and reminding us of the days when bands were allowed to take their music to the limit and then explore it beside the fame-hall at the end of stardom.

Liars will never be in obvious chart-contention because their music is the kind that expends the horizons, traces the future paths, raises pulses in the darkest corners of imagination and contains hooks that are hard to locate. It takes attention, concentration and appreciation of near-bizarre world-views to truly dig this lot en masse. If you grew up with Nirvana and the likes, you may get lost in this sonic cosmos from euphoria to two-tone song, but if your fave outfit has been Sonic Youth - their album ‘Bad Moon Rising’ in particular - you’ll find this a heaven.

Minimalism, eruption, effects, noise, drumming to shake foundations, subtle and abrasive, melodies buried so deep inside the songs you may need forensics to extract… Liars are challenging, exhilarating, wild, nuts, mad, rock/cyber-age hooligans. Witches [or should that be ‘bitches’?] is the apparent topic of their album but the truth is - fear. Of the unknown, the unseen [mental/fictitious rather than spooky/theological] and the one that ignorance creates.

After the opening track, singer/guitarist/bassist Angus Andrew discards the nurse’s uniform to reveal an all-white ensemble with a top that would have been considered questionable even in the ‘kitsch-decade’ [the 1970s, so you don’t have to ask your elders]. It only emphasises how much Liars don’t belong to any epoch but their own time-frame. Promoting the second album, ‘They Were Wrong, So We Drowned’ - the forthcoming single ‘We Fenced Other Gardens With Bones Of Our Own’ was inserted during the hour-long mayhem as well as few cuts from the debut ‘They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top’.

But, set-list ain’t as important here because it is the whole show that demonstrates the attitude of this rebellious lot… And, Liars don’t play the usual rock-game - apart from drummer Ron Albertson crowd-surfing before the encores - and that leads to few onstage gems: the first occurs while Andrew is posing ‘solos’ [played by Aaron Hemphill] only to discover that he had pulled his lead out of the amp when he needed to start strumming!?

They also don’t leave the stage to make us scream ‘More!’ for a few extra songs, as AA explains, and simply play on. The band lost a member [bassist Pat Nature] between these albums but it seems to have opened another door to their wild and gettin’-more-deranged nature. We wouldn’t have it any other way because they address the unbalanced world that invade our frontrooms. The potent antidote to the Lego-pop, rock-for-bucks and bling-rap…

Although all art is lies, Liars are its major ambassadors… Effortlessly.