Tools
Liars w/Young People, the Get Hustle, Nordic
Fri March 26, Graceland, 9 pm, $10.
Stranger Personals
The Philippines-born and Australia-reared Angus Andrew, frontperson for Liars, graduated from Cal Arts in 1999, where he shared a studio with the band's current drummer, Julian Gross, and met onetime music-store clerk guitarist Aaron Hemphill. During this time, he relished in the school's freedom and critical dissonance. "The best part of the curriculum," drawls Andrew from Montreal, "was that if you were there for photography, it was just as valid if you made an installation or a video... or swam or something."
At art school, he picked up the bass for the first time, snatching every 10-minute between-class interval that he could to make noise with Gross. "Basically got to the point where I felt like to be a modern artist, you needed to be multimedia. I realized that making music, being in a band and performing, was really one art form that encompassed all mediums, because you had performance and you had to make art work and you had to write. I was happy with that and also really frustrated with the sort of snobby, stale art scene and the gallery space. So it was nice to find something and you just make a tape and hand it to a friend... and there's none of this snooty stuff about white walls."
The easygoing frontperson has been amiably suffering at the hands of disappointed music critics--who'd previously built up Liars--since the release of the band's bewitching and provocative second album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned (2004, Mute), which casts an evil eye on the European folklore of the witches' Sabbath Walpurgisnacht. Legend has it that witches cele- brated the last day of spring, April 31, with an unspeakably wicked bash on Germany's Brocken Mountain. As reality had it, in the 16th century, those accused of witchcraft paid for their imagined revels with trials and certain death. All of this made its way into the phased-out, strobing electronic clank and drone of Wrong, which opens with Andrew chanting, "Blood-blood-blood... wanna be your horse/wanna be your horse."
Liars' pagan earth mamas--and their persecution by religious fanatics--ties into current art-world preoccupations: At the current Whitney Biennial, Sue de Beer's installation, Hans und Grete, stands out with its identification of both folk tales and death metal amid other artists' fixations on nature, decay, and goth iconography.
Consider Wrong Liars' Brocken Witch Project.
The album rides a wild little broomstick on the heels of 2001's They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top (Mute). Back then, in the halcyon days of '01, they were the NYC out-rock heirs apparent, touring alongside Andrew paramour Karen O's band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But Wrong has received more ambivalent reviews. Complex, for example, sniffed, "Liars have been spending way too much time with Wizard of Oz videos and Ouija boards."
Would these writers be happier with another Strokes-ian/NYC-crock sound-alike album? Instead, Andrew and Hemphill decided to rely on their intuition, "smash" up Liars and their "formulas," and start over again. The album's witchy theme came about the same way, once the trio moved to a house in the wilds of New Jersey to record it. The rural locale was otherworldly compared to their previous urban environment. "You took three guys who had been living in Brooklyn for however long in their little apartments... to someplace where it's really dark at night, and it's immediately scary," Andrew muses.
But even that situation changed when the vocalist moved out of his rustic bunker two weeks ago and relocated--Brocken beats and all--to Berlin. "I think I really reached the point of being saturated," he sighs. "I found [America] exciting in all aspects, even how evil it can be, and when America was invading Iraq, I thought things could really change. But then they caught Saddam and then suddenly, whoa, everything was way back to normal. It kinda burst my bubble and I had to run."
Meanwhile there's another album in the can--the fruit of further art-making in the N.J. basement but perhaps without a certain home at Mute, the vocalist says with a wheeze and chortle. "God, I don't want to say this, but could it possibly be... weirder?"
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