New Liars album: 1 star in rolling stone, F in Spin

usually i like rubbish records but this is more boring than 'wow, that's really messed up'.

This is what I thought when I saw all the hateration, and I was all excited about it... then I heard it. Execrable. And yes, really boring because all the songs are rubbish and unlistenable in the same way.

In the Melody Maker era under Mark Sutherland this was often typical, they would dish out 4/5 marks for trad rock rubbish and give experimental/ avant albums low scores.

The Liars track completely split the 6 Music chatroom a couple weeks ago - there were those that thought it was revolting noise, others saying at last some different/creative / cathartic / unusual.

It will interesting to see the metacritic music score for this album.

Stevie Chick in Kerrang gave the Liars the full 5K.

seriously though if you want bad lo-fi shriekback noise b-side exercises, get the liars album. yawn. i'll trade you mind for some crack.

1000 Hurts is nowhere near At Action Park, but it has some nice parts.

but yes, its just a bad album.

the first signs of the pil shakes on the postpunxx revolutionaries. WE HAVE NO IDEAS. WAIT. WE CAN ALWAYS DO THIS..??

Anyway, i hear similar sounds to Cabaret Voltaire's Nag Nag Nag - on this new Liars single.

This is utter horseshit. Which one of the critics had "trad" tastes? And I suppose no morons out there give "extreme/ abrasive/ caustic/ experimental" crap the benefit of the doubt either, right? Truth be told the Liars' debut album wasn't all that great in the first place. I didn't make it through the new one, partly because there's way more interesting "extreme/ abrasive/ caustic/ experimental" music to spend time with these days. Not to mention much better "trad" music.

which one of these critics had trad taste: many no-mark planks that mark sutherland bought into the Melody Maker from 1997 onwards, in place of excellent critics such as selzer, reynolds and stubbs etc ..even Simon Price left as he had the guts to tell Mark Sutherland that Oasis live were shite.

my definition of trad tates, would be rock music that is playlisted on radio [structured song oriented rock music that is played on radio:]

and THE exclusion of anything different [avant jazz, ambient, post rock, dark/ extreme metal, Industrial, goth/ darkwave/ ethereal, microhouse/ tech-house, post-punk, avant prog, experimental electronic music etc ]

that is playlisted on Virgin Radio [in the UK], Radio 1, and daytime Xfm and 6 Music - plus the artists commonly supported by NME and Q,

an indicative example of trad rock tastes: would be music played on Virgin Radio [in the UK]
http://www.virginradio.co.uk/

Translated into American speak - rock music that would be playlisted on Clear Channel [Modern] Rock stations, featured in Spin and Rolling Stone.

Martian, you're doing yourself no favors with your equation of "popular" and "bad"

I don't know if I agree w/ Martian, but I thought the equation he was making was "popular" and "trad"

It's also wonderful to learn that commercial radio never plays any music that contains "anything different."

THE ROLLING STONE REVIEW

During the recent New York rock revival, Liars established themselves as one of the city's more exciting live acts, spazzing out onstage while six-foot-six-inch Australian lead singer Angus Andrew screamed half-intelligibly over the band's funk-punk pulse. That pulse is absent on Liars' second album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, an electronic-noise collage that sounds disturbingly rooted in the what-the-fuck? tradition of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Purportedly inspired by a German Halloween-like holiday, "Broken Witch" opens the album with bell-like sound effects and sporadic snare hits, after which Andrew begs someone to tell him the tale of the children who stood in the way of the endless winter. "They Don't Want Your Corn They Want Your Kids" likewise forms a groove out of spastic drumming and electro blips, to no real end. Making a record about fear is one thing; making a record you fear listening to is quite another.

CHRISTIAN HOARD

I may be a devil's advocate, splitting hairs or just really tired, but that's what I was thinking.

trad rock in Britain is to do with the conformist/ regressive / boring bland conservative rock music that is reliant on conformist song structures that clogs up radio playlists!

trad rock tastes would include:

Turin Brakes
Kings of Leon
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Oasis
Ash
Electric Soft Parade
The Thrills
Counting Crows
Jet
Vines
Darkness
The Strokes
The Coral
John Mayer
Funeral for a Friend

It's the positioning of a radio station/ magazine - it's reflective of what they play/support and more importantly what they EXCLUDE.

The point I am making is that those with trad rock tastes/ be they radio DJs/ station controllers/ magazine editors or writers/ journalists or just listeners - is that their aesthetic/ mind set is reflective of liking a narrow focus of rock music - they are not prepared to go outside their self contained trad rock focus, i.e in away trad rockists.

Trad is short for traditional rock and roll. You take a look at the playlists for Virgin, Xfm or the bbc stations - look at what they include and exclude.

Re: I still don't see how implying that "not trad" = "great" also implies that "trad" = "not great."

The point I am making is do with Meta Systems - the trad rock mafia in Britain: NME/ Q / Virgin Radio / trad-rockists on 6 Music such as Bob Harris and Mark Sutherland etc support a narrow focus of trad rock bands and they exclude a wide spectrum of sounds and artists due to their limited music trad rock interests.

(they're fucking shit as well, but that's beside the point).

whiney conformist formula: wailing whiney emo vocals over a predictable stodgy loud rock sounds, predictable breakdown sections and simple catchy choruses = loud traditional rock.

if you want an example of an inventive heavy/loud rock band: see Americans: Botch - We are the Romans is a modern masterpiece of complexity.

you can count in Hundred Reasons as trad rockers too.

Best assessment of Rolling Stone and Spin I've heard in a long time.

(btw i LOVE metal machine music)

(but i don't think it's much like metal machine music at all)

Thanks, Martian. Now I know why I quite like Funeral For A Friend. They push my basest, most obvious buttons. Goodbye shame!

I do question your definitions of "conformist" though.. it seems to be a codeword for things you don't like.

(Hundred Reasons are shit, you couldn't be righter about that).

I really like 'There's Always Room On The Broom' though, it's just the right balance of catchy and hideous.

I've only heard it twice so far, but I think this album is fantastic.

avant jazz, ambient, post rock, dark/ extreme metal, Industrial, goth/ darkwave/ ethereal, microhouse/ tech-house, post-punk, avant prog, experimental electronic music = some of the most conformist musics out there, when you get down to it. (Almost every single one of them is partly defined by what you're not ALLOWED to do.)

Not entirely.

i played it (along with some new Icarus Line, a rtack off the Bornx album, and '$50' off the new Oneida) on a guest appearance on Tom Robinson's Radio6 show recently. I don't think Tom enjoyed Liars at all;' when the track finished, he started talking about the concept of 'tune-out' sounds, sound that will automatically cause people to tune to another station. i argued that i thought it was so 'tune-out' that it caused people to tune right back in again, but he didn't seem convinced. he then said, of Oneida, that Brian Eno once described repitition as a form of progress, which i thought was quite smart.

i totally love the album, though, for the mood it evokes, and the thrill of the noises. for me, its most like 'Bad Moon Rising' Sonic Youth, though i understand why lots of people won't enjoy it. i stand by my 5K review though, and have given it 4*s in the Times as well.

So I don't know. If its supposed to be about somekind of mood or atmosphere I doubt I'll get into it. I wish there was another actual song in there and one less zzzzzzz instrumental track.

The only person that slags things w/ any regularity in the Wire seems to be David Keenan (normally when he gets 100 words on something more nominally 'trad')

I haven't heard the Liars album. Their song on the Fall 02 Mute comp is OK, not great. Drukqs is, however, masterful. And I could easily do without Big Black and PiL. But maybe not without Metal Machine Music or Bad Moon Rising

sorry for blabbing. hooray RS + Spin

Jody wonderfully OTM.

I think your tolerance of this record depends on your tolerance of art students in general. I'm sure that the smart people of this board have heard records more abrasive and "difficult" than this. However, if you think it's crap, fair enough. As I may have said elsewhere, I'm a big fan, and I like this for what it is. It has a kind of cut n paste alien funk to it and the lyrics are as ridiculous as the song titles. They are chancers and they are stoners and maybe they're laughing at themselves and maybe they're laughing at us. If you didn't like the Butthole Surfers the first time round, you're unlikely to change your mind now.

The face and expression Nick Cave, but the pose Michael Hutchence?

But they're not as open as disco, or hip hop, or Nashville country, or Latin freestyle, or '80s dance oriented pop, or '70s radio rock, or '60s soul, or '60s garage rock.

Do you think that it's at least possible that this view might prioritize certain types of "limitations" or "openness" more than others? If we're looking at technical or structural aspects, these statements seem false. (You do seem familiar with John Zorn - from Naked City to Redbird to Masada to Cobra we are dealing with very different types of instrumentation, compositional setup, track length, . . . as well as very different moods and attitudes. And I certainly hear a lot of variety from Sonny Sharrock's 60s work to his Last Exit noise to his Kate Bush interpretation on Highlife. Pretty much everything on a Top 40 station is a song between 2 and 5 minutes length with verse/chorus structure, with vocals and a beat, usually in 4/4 time, regardless of sonic weirdness that might be part of the package. These things do make a difference in my view.) I'm guessing that you're looking at it from another perspective, in terms of the emotional effect you get out of the material? (In this case, do you think that pop might communicate more to you because you implicitly buy into certain stylistic conventions that you don't care to challenge? Not an inherently bad thing in itself necessarily but just a point I'm curious about.) Or maybe you think that aspects like production texture are more important than large-scale structural elements? Like I said, I'm not rejecting the perspective at all but I am curious how you'd elaborate on this. Because it doesn't appear self-evident when it's just asserted like that.

Nine Inch Nails and Siouxsie and the Banshees were chosen as genre examples, not because I have any deep love for them (though they have moments, as does Justin Timberlake. Not that he was having many at Downsview Park last summer. I suppose I'd probably take "Playground Twist" (better tune and voice) or "Closer" (better beat) over "Cry Me a River" if pressed but that's another question.)

I've read and enjoyed and highly praised Stairway to Hell and Accidental Evolution. Do you have other books?

This is a rather unfair comparison. Comparing everything that's played on a radio station over 10 years to the work of one avant garde musician!? And this means that avant-garde music in general has less variety than chart pop? That's silliness.

Anyway, I think the real issue is that for someone whose ears are trained to listen to popular music (ie., most people), they are able to discern more subtle differences within that genre and their ears are more attuned to the meanings of those differences. Whereas listening to avant-garde music - which in an objective sense features much more variety in terms of sound, structure, compositional strategy, etc. - their ears don't register those differences, because it all just sounds like a bunch of noise. You could paraphrase the pop argument as basically saying that avant-garde music is conformist because it all sounds like a bunch of noise - which indeed it does, to someone who's not listening.

sundar and nate correct: an avant garde musician may spend his whole life developing one or a very narrow set of ideas.

avant garde radio needed for chuck.

Was rapeman before or after Big Black bcz i liked that one album they put out.

robert frost, The New Republic, Oct 25, 1958

Comments.

Anyway, I just heard this and its very listenable compared to whatever proto-industrial/no-wave/noise touchstones you wanna compare it to. I don't know how it got such low reviews; reviews that bad should be reserved for poorly executed pop hardcore!

Metacritic rulz!

http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/lightningbolt/wonderfulrainbow/

Scroll down to see what magnet said

scroll down here.... magnet!!!!

hee hee!

Blender
If the White Stripes gave up blues-rock for steroids, acid and death metal, they might sound something like this. [Apr 2003, p.124]

HAHAHA OMG

Wondering if this band would have even gotten press if they weren't from NYC.

Definitely not.... for once, the rest of us actually benefited from Manhattan myopia.... (I kid, sort of.)

It's certainly musically a direction I'd have been delighted to have heard Radiohead go. The tribablistic, really very very creative (for a rock band) use of instruments & smeary strange noises sounding very unforced in a brilliantly lo-fi production mix. Pretty accessible too.

The "concept" or the songs however... don't really hold up, keep my interest or draw me in closer after 4/5 plays at all sadly. I'll probably delete this but it's very worth a curious listen.

But they're definitely a band justifying their existence right now. I might check out the previous record based on hearing this.

Which is probably wildly unfair and innacurate but there you go ;)

This album rules.

The repeated, buried guitar riff near the end of the first track is what I always wish Braniac would sound like, and I like Braniac.

yeah, i still love this album.
i had my ipod on shuffle, today and they don't want your corn, they want your children came on. what a wonderful song that is.

Yep, lotsa love here too.
bros are genius.

the phrase "Animal Collective with balls" kept springing to mind whilst listening to it...

I initially didn't like this statement, but maybe it's ok.

i love this album. "There's Always Room On The Broom" was my halloween jam for 2004

i love halloween jams.

Their best record, I think.

mmm pumpkin jam

think drum's not dead is better as an album, but this one is rawer and rocks more.

Liars plan on writing a new album in 2007 and have hinted at a more direct, straightforward approach than previous works.

i like the first album too. so as long as the new one doesn't sound like kaiser cheifs or whatever, i'm cool.

listen to new song here.
http://www.adultswim.com/williams/music/warmandscratchy/

i don't think it's angus singing on this one.

also, that tvotr song is pretty great.

I hated this album when it came out just because I was hoping for more of the same as the last album and this was too radical of a departure for me to handle at the time, but since then this album has definitely become my favorite Liars album. I wonder if this is what caused the initial backlash against this album from nearly everyone else as well.

by the time they were wrong came out i was growing bored of the whole "hey, we can do gang of four" type thing anyway.

Man, that new Liars song...the bass line makes my butt tingle, it just doesn't fit.

i like it. sounds like oneida.

a paraphrased excerpt from the Top 100 albums of all time list, published by Pitchfork in 2056.

"obviously, it's a classic album. afterall, the mainstream outlets slammed it upon release, thereby proving that it was 'ahead of its time.'"

funny how this got panned but Drum's Not Dead is acclaimed, when they pretty much sound exactly the same.

excited for the new one. This is a very interesting band.

Still a great album, yes.

yes

i love this album. "There's Always Room On The Broom" was my halloween jam for 2004

-- latebloomer, Tuesday, May 22, 2007 1:05 AM (8 months ago) Bookmark Link

RIP Liars, new album is pabulum.

This however was fucking great.

Was and is.

remember this

This album was ~*very important*~ to my small group of friends in high school. We saw them play it in a church in Chicago and thought it the best show ever. I haven't listened to this in 10 years, though.

they were wrong so we drowned: still the best liars album

happy halloween

I feel like all of their albums up to Mess are the best liars album, and I only chop it off there because I haven't heard the later ones.

Brad OTM - I saw them play just before Drum's Not Dead and the feeling of being in a totally wired crowd of about 200 chanting "WE ARE THE ARMY YOU SEE THROUGH THE RED HAZE OF BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD!" is a lifetime memory.
Tim there's only one since Mess apart from a soundtrack, and it's Angus solo after Aaron decided not to continue (hence the jilted bride cover art). I really like Theme From Crying Fountain though, more than Mess even. God I hope they get the trio back together sometime when they feel fresh again.

I think he just released another Liars album a month ago, confusingly titled Titles with the Word Fountain. Presumably a sequel of sorts.

Yeah it's outtakes, I don't count it as another album per se but in some ways it's just as good.

This album was ~*very important*~ to my small group of friends in high school.

Same, we were obsessed with the opening tracks in particular.

Drum's Not Dead was so hard to follow up, almost like they ran out of left turns after that. What a brilliant record. Have tried but not been able to stay w/ them since

I loved the more melodic self-titled at the time, but kind of stopped following along after that. They were fantastic live ca. 2008.

They Were Wrong and Drum's Not Dead are the albums I really care about.

I liked the first record when it came out but I wasn't as hyped on it as seemingly everyone else I knew was, but so I was still pretty interested in the 2nd record and I remember when I read that Spin review I was like "oh shit now I am REALLY excited for this record!"

So good, still probably but I haven't listened in a while, though it was semi-perm brain-tape for a long time. Drum's Not Dead never blew up my skirts, though I feel like I saw them live around that time and was impressed how fucked up & no wave ugly they were live, esp when it seemed like the crowd really wanted them to be cool Radiohead or something.

Also I forgot how much the music press in 99-00 was "finally...rock music is BACK!" cuz there was like 1.5 rock bands in NYC

man what was up with the spin and rolling stone reviews for They Were Wrong? does anyone have the full text? the only thing i can find (via the metacritic page is:

RS: "An electronic-noise collage that sounds disturbingly rooted in the what-the-fuck? tradition of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music."
Spin: "Unlistenable."

who rises to the rank of pro music critic and then can't handle They Were Wrong So We Drowned, jfc

(sorry if someone here wrote it)

Spin: https://books.google.ca/books?id=9VQ5UluNUkIC&lpg=PA96

Rolling Stone: https://web.archive.org/web/20080630074454/http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/liars/albums/album/5003637/review/5941581/they_were_wrong_so_we_drowned

this album slaps

thanks jmm!

spin:

https://i.imgur.com/tB104wv.png

RS:

During the recent New York rock revival, Liars established themselves as one of the city's more exciting live acts, spazzing out onstage while six-foot-six-inch Australian lead singer Angus Andrew screamed half-intelligibly over the band's funk-punk pulse. That pulse is absent on Liars' second album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, an electronic-noise collage that sounds disturbingly rooted in the what-the-fuck? tradition of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Purportedly inspired by a German Halloween-like holiday, "Broken Witch" opens the album with bell-like sound effects and sporadic snare hits, after which Andrew begs someone to tell him the tale of the children who stood in the way of the endless winter. "They Don't Want Your Corn They Want Your Kids" likewise forms a groove out of spastic drumming and electro blips, to no real end. Making a record about fear is one thing; making a record you fear listening to is quite another.

honestly i think making a record that people fear listening to is a lifetime achievement

"spazzbo" "spazzing" "spastic"

who rises to the rank of pro music critic and then can't handle They Were Wrong So We Drowned, jfc

srsly

i'm reading the vines cover story (for their worldbeating second album) in the same issue of spin, lol

ha, I'm reading back through that Spin issue as well. The dog show metaphor in the "Spin's Best in Show" feature is awful.

they were skronk so we clowned

Looking back on those reviews, did either of the reviewers actually listen to the record? The Spin one seems to imply they only made it 13 minutes?

Tbf "I listened to 13 minutes and I thought it sucked so I shut it off" is a kinda of awesome review

kind of feel like your listening experience isn't very broad if you listen to this album and the closest thing you can compare it to is Metal Machine Music

I approve of this new Liars renaissance on here. 'They threw us in a trench" was my first Liars album. I rarely revisit it, but 'Drum's not dead' I still play quite a bit. Everything in between is good to great. I seem to be of the minority opinion that 'TFCF' was a true return to from, somewhat. I love that album.

whatever you say. personally i couldn't make it past the first 20 seconds due to the nightmarish pure noise. the sounds made no sense, i couldn't tell what was happening so i shut it off as soon as i could find the laptop again

First 20 seconds of?

OIC

oops, xp! i was just goofin' at the traumatized spin and RS reviews

I realize! Didn't catch it due to me being dumb

don't call yourself dumb (because then, selfishly, i will have to think of myself for several million similar things i've done)

:D

Their cover of Territorial Pissings that I saw on the Drums Not Dead tour fucking ripped so hard. Kurt would be proud.
I was a huge fan of their first album at the time and was bummed when I read that their drummer and bass player were leaving but both Liars and These Are Powers went on to make some of my favorite music of the last 15 years (that n0 things album was pretty good, too).

I jammed "They Were Wrong" over the wknd and it is still great, sort of funny to think of people, like maybe other than my mom, acting like the record is some unlistenable/noise blast/fuck you album, it's pretty catchy! Also, this was obvious at the time, but no one had ever heard "Flowers of Romance"?

Speaking to it's catchy qualities I just received a report that the 4.5 yo was just heard singing "BLOOD!BLOOD!BLOOD!BLOOD!"

and This Heat of course

I think those people were all geared up for another nyc dance punk record that year, it was like liars owed them something and they were pissy they didn't get it

my only connection to this band is that my bff taught their lead singer how to grow dank hydro weed

and i love them for that

Angus is the only band member left so that hydro must be longevity fuel

heh, it helps get ppl thru things financially i am sure

They Threw Us All in a Trench and Put a Monument on Top was visceral and mesmerizing, it reminded me of how excited I was about post-punk in the 80s

also liked the audacity of the 20-minute long repeated riff at the end

and Stuck a Monument on Top

Best 00s band