The End of the 00s: Everybody in His or Her Own Life Needs a Hobby, by Matt Ealer
This 2000s-giving I am most grateful for Brooklyn by way of Australia by way of California art school and transplanted to Berlin but then eventually returned to America in some pitch-shifted, flame-scarred Polaroid memento of Southern Californian dreamy excess band Liars. Let me tell you why.
Liars released their first full-length, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, in 2001. Lead single "Mr Your On Fire Mr" found the group bounding about, spring-boarding off coil-tight white boy funk and serious Adderall-snorting problems. There are still bands cribbing this red-wine reduction sauce post-punk. I mean, look at this.
Lead bro Angus Andrew is dressed completely in white. They are playing in fucking Coney Island. There are still plenty of people for whom this video pretty much typifies the (still sorta controversial!) pejorative term "hipster."
And yet. The song is called "Mr Your On Fire Mr," the [sic]s and the quease-inducing clearly intentional. The lyrics are some serious spazzed-out dada ish. Something always seemed different. It wasn't the slick, primped package revivalism of the once-bleeding edge that, say, the Strokes or the Rapture dealt in. (Tellingly, they rejected the definite article.) When the band spoke, they didn't seem to be calculating some legacy. You got the same odd mix of dread and excitement that you did reading or listening to James Chance and Lydia Lunch back in the day, right here in the (then) now.
I was introduced to the band after reading one such interview in the dead tree Swingset and purchasing the Fins to Make Us More Fish-Like EP. (Another great point about this band is the added value — singles and EPs are almost always worth your time, as a consumer.) And after a glacial sheen of mangled and murdered krautrock and a spurting collection of fuzz bursts and vocal bleats haphazardly spackled together into anti-song came a mix of Monument's lead-off track, "Grown Men Don't Fall in the River Just Like That."
And here, so perfectly did they mimic and place out of context on a marble slab in a dead museum the very concept of the political agitprop rock song qua rock song that they brought the entire existence of a Gang of Four into question, let alone that band's many imitators.
It was so perfect in its transgressive glory that they could've easily missed their own subversion, given in to how good they were bringing the block-rocking beats and kept their "fingers on the pulse of America!" They could have become the Arcade Fire of the term "angular" as a subgenre of rock and roll. Instead, they fired the rhythm section so integral to that sound and hid in the woods to write a concept album about witches.
While everyone was busy lumping them in with Gang of Four because it was the most obvious choice, nobody really got at the pale-faced obtuseness that linked them more with Andrew's Prison Island forebearers the Birthday Party. And really, for all the people that cite them as an influence, no one has ever really known what to make of the Birthday Party. They didn't fit strictly into the punk or new wave or goth or no wave boxes. They named themselves after a Pinter play for a reason. That reason was to be oblique. A turgid way of being spartan and stark.
Liars share this. This weird, vaguely threatening nebulousness. It's a sense of wonder and the unknown that is by no means wonderful. It's alive and vital, it makes you ask questions and doubt and, hopefully, think and feel in a way you hadn't before.
I say this because there was another band coming out of the woods at the same time with very different intentions. Animal Collective was all campfire sing-songs and Sesame Street. It was Beat Happening without the distinct undercurrent of dread and excitement at the prospect of growing up. It was "Black or White" without the fucked up coda of wilin' out on some car and morphing into a motherfucking black panther. And look where it got them. They're now the alt music equivalent of daddybloggers. The "cool dads" who are all, "yeah man, I was totally into Pet Sounds when I was your age, it is chill with me if you smoke some doobies, broseph."
Liars went into those woods and goddamn dug up the bones of little girls drowned before sweet sixteen for consorting with The Devil. Their soundscapes weren't ambient, soothing cocoon noise washers; they were – literally – books writing themselves that sounded like those bones scratching at the tops of their maggot-infested caskets. What makes the greatest founder race of the greatest nation in the world burn their young at the stake and drown them in the river? Why was that cool, America? My finger is not on that pulse! These are the things that Liars asked and said with this record. It was an investigation of aborted and disjointed tweedom instead of the puerile worshipping of some pure avatar of adolescence.
So anyway, then everyone hated that album and they out-hipped everyone by moving to a place that had Berlinability, Berlin, and wrote a record that, magically, everyone loved because – and here much credit must be given to a band called, um, Liars – it was discovered that when the single-milk is being given away for free (for better or worse, agency or not), you'd better damn well make sure that your album isn't just a collection of singles. That it has ebb and flow and narrative and an over-arching scheme. (A "concept," LOL.)
Oh and then they skipped out on Berlin and wrote a record full of block rockin' hot tracks and sun-O.D.'d bleach blonde surfer struts and bleeding o.g. punk revivalism. So, a record full of singles. Except kind of not, because here again, there's an underlying sense of rot at the bottom of these tracks. They Were Wrong, So We Drowned ended with a great mind-warp of a dirge, all organ-grinders and ambient cuddly forest creatures shown for their true Satanic colors. But Liars has a better one, all the trappings of why it's so cool to be "down and out on the Lower East Side/Williamsburg and chillin' with your peeps and not letting the man get you down" except they are then turned around until the psychological and physical dependencies and the power dynamics and the grime and cockroaches that fill your belly and the sense of banal white cultural tourism is so much to make you claustrophobic. "Protection" indeed.
Presently, the band is prepping another California record, this one set (at least to these ears, at least after a paltry few spins of the first leak or two) to render obsolete the memory of Radiohead like "Grown Men Don't Fall in the River Just Like That" did to Gang of Four.
And that, my friends, is why the world needs a Liars. Because there is the potentiality in them to raze the entire rock 'n world. God willing, this band will never be celebrated in a Hall of Fame.
Matt Ealer spends way too much time thinking about Batman and ABBA in and around the Washington, DC area. He tumbls, because why not.
Band photos cannot look not-douchey.
Thank you for saying what needs saying.
"Photographer, please emphasize as much as possible my resemblance to a cattle-stunned Will Ferrell." "How's that?" "Wait, let me slacken my jaw a bit more. Perfect. Take the shot taketheshot."
I know I hold my head at at 65 degree angle so the light emphasizes my cheekbones ALL THE TIME.
"Let's only light half of the ugly guy's face. That way we can sell him as 'mysterious'".
THE ugly guy?
Alright.
Actually Cheekbones McBlackhair looks like on of my ex-boyfriends so I'll shut it.
No, it's cool — this discussion distracts from the crucial word or two missing from the opening sentence. You know, the one(s) that would make it possible for me to parse it without getting an instant angry headache.
CLAPPING EXCITEDLY AS I HAVE NEVER CLAPPED EXCITEDLY IN MY LIFE!!!
yes in deeeeeeed.
I too am doing this. Attendant eyes have accepted my perceived insanity.
His tumblr can't contain him – this was great.
I want to second that!
As I have a difficult time understanding music that does not seem to share in an aesthetic of "the beautiful" (however problematic it may be to define beauty), this is not so much white cultural tourism for me as an education of sorts. I want to try to understand it; thanks for an introduction to this, the music of Liars.
In the reception history of rock music, why is it that we must interpret every aspect of a band's oeuvre through the lens of what we think the band is about? At this point, would it be possible for Liars to produce a record in which you wouldn't hear "an underlying sense of rot"?
Probably not! As a consumer, I will create my narrative for myself in order to engage with this work, and this just happens to be it.
It's like, I invoke the Birthday Party above, and I think that, whatever you want to call it, there is some basic Nick Cave-ness to all the varied music he's produced lo these many years.
Actually, come to think of it, I would kind of hope not! While a band's core may evolve over time, those who lose it completely and start putting out music that doesn't have any relation with what it was that made them great in the first place (again, not necessarily lyrical or genre-based or even stylistic, it's something very nebulous I'm talking about here) are themselves lost. See, I dunno, Metallica.
Oh, man. I'm not sure how I heard of these guys (I somehow stumbled into a YYYs obsession in 2002/03, and I think that had a lot to do with it), but I remember a) being in love and b) being technically impressed. I brought a couple friends to see them opening for said YYYs during their 'witch' period, and the hipsters were practically booing them off the stage, but I had an aural boner the whole time. The idea of attaching effect-pedals to the drum microphones just never crossed my mind (as it didn't cross theirs, until they saw Bjork do it).
Love this! But they are sort of love/hate; one time I put "Mr Your On Fire Mr" on a mix cd and that person still thinks I'm weird.
I know, no one make all-or-nothing statements about taste because we all have weird bruises in our taste veneer that require long personal narratives, but this person who thinks you are weird has never danced on the precipice.
no one SHOULD make*
Damn it to hell.
I love that Matt's intense somewhat-public (if we can call Tumblr posting public) Michael Jackson listening party made its presence felt here.
Ah, the motherfucking Liars. Back when I was 16 and still looking for music that I identified as "beautiful," the kind that maybe could numb me forever (Long aside: My benchmarks for these qualities were Sigur Ros records and "Horses" by Tori Amos. Listening to these at a young age will ruin you. All your friends will wonder why you don't contort yourself to the black void but instead lay in bed with headphones on and fall asleep for half the record. They are right to wonder!) I found They Put us In a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top at the local library, where I also first discovered Fugazi's The Argument, so it is also essentially where I was born, I exploded from its thin, shoe-worn blue rug a being of mutant punk rock, fuck everything, everything is fucked. Monument shorted me out on first listen, its drug funk and endless looped coda made me its car wreck, its burning debris. Fuck beauty I want to die.
Knew I would fuck up that record title and I didn't even bother to check.
Also I should take time out from talking about my damn self (and also add to a comment thread containing only myself, you see where these things lead), and say this piece is goddamn stellar, Matt.
Listening to weird indie music at a young age does have permanent effects, I think, but I'm still waiting to find out what they are. Were you ever into The Unicorns?
Not particularly and I'm still not, but from what I remember, they had weird sounds on that record, which, according to my teenage musical philosophy, just got in the way of the tunes, man. I also suppose at the time I was looking for more bombast in a record about ghosts and death (it may indeed be bombastic, I don't remember it well), which I was served soon enough with Funeral, which… I don't like to get all down on my younger self or anything, his intentions were sweet-natured if a little given to big empty indie nothings, but fuck that record.
My worst year musically was 2004, where I bit onto every 8.0-plus review Pitchfork published and followed it into bored oblivion (revelation of "this is a fucking terrible practice because this is fucking boring music" came to me while listening to Architecture in Helsinki). My reaction was to listen to a lot of punk rock and metal. Both were the sort of calculated decisions you make when you're still establishing your taste–you find this great group of people who are smart and funny and are into the kind of stuff that seems like it's gonna alter you, so you wear its skin for a while until you can't distinguish yourself from it.
happy New Year guys
I enjoyed reading about these bros.
Excellent.