Liars
Liars (Mute)
On their new self-titled album, Liars depart from the art-noise experimentation of their recent work, but it sounds like they haven’t quite figured out what to replace it with. The songs on Liars are united by the dark, clattering, echoing production, but underneath all the murk, the album’s 11 tracks run through a bizarre gamut of styles. The post-punk sturm und drang of ‘Plaster Casts of Everything’ starts the album on a promising note, but gives way to the head-nodding groove and half-moaned vocals of ‘Houseclouds’, a misfire that can’t help but recall, of all things, Beck. ‘Cycle Time’ is almost a parody of arena rock, while ‘Freak Out’ has the mellow feel of a Jesus and Mary Chain song. ‘Pure Unevil’ could pass for a cast-off from EVOL, and the closer, ‘Protection’, seems to nod to Pink Floyd and Radiohead. To Liars’ credit, these strange diversions work more often than not. In the end, though, the album’s best moment is ‘Clear Island’ — a model marriage of groove, noise, and rock, that sounds, more than anything else, like Liars.
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