Liars - 'Liars' (Mute) Released 20/08/07

And it’s ironic how this approach manifests itself across ‘Liars’ with tracks that, uniquely for this band, immediately evoke other recognisable and iconic artists. Whether it is meant as a salute from one set of innovators to their myriad spiritual predecessors, or just the sound of three musicians deciding that there’s no room for the intellectualism of old when you have a reductive guitar riff as fearsome as that for lead track ‘Plaster Casts Of Everything’ is, at the end of the day, academic. If anything this conscious referencing is indicative of Angus Andrew’s recent assertion that the songs on ‘Liars’ are inspired by “the ideas that you associate with many melodramatic bands like The Smiths or The Cure that maybe you remember listening to when you’re young and how those songs are really poignant and direct”.

So ‘Sailing To Byzantium’ is reminiscent of late-90s Massive Attack (off-key guitar excepted), the bleepy, beat-driven ‘Houseclouds’ would fit neatly onto any of the last two Beck records, while ‘Freak Out’ and ‘Pure Unevil’ are overt nods to the gods of noise-pop The Jesus And Mary Chain; the latter begins on an ominous drum that recalls the ‘They Were Wrong…’ material, before finding a psychedelic vein of multi-tracked vocals and undulating guitar rich enough to get sweetly, deliriously lost within, while the former is a euphoric facsimile of pretty much everything from ‘Psychocandy’. As templates go it’s a hard record to beat for inspiration; Liars’ pounding nonchalance is so good it renders nearly every other garage record of 2007 irrelevant by comparison.

Although the relatively formless ‘Leather Prowler’ and ‘What Would They Know’ lean heavily towards the older, more caustic material, it would be misguided to assume that their presence suggests Liars aren’t wholly fixated on abandoning their former selves. What’s more likely is that the alchemy of their band is so firmly established, their outlook on music so well established, that no matter what discipline they turn their hand to, whether it be noise, percussive sketches, pop, or somewhere in between, within the results you’ll always find a voice and sound that is recognisably theirs. It’s that consistent, crackling, restless thread again, weaving its way through these songs of escape and desertion. For Liars the more things that change, the more they stay the same.