When you attend a Liars’ show, you necessarily focus on Angus Andrew’s voice and its wild range, actually the guy is pretty entertaining, theatrical and intense and it’s difficult to observe anything else. But yeah, during their show at Space 15 Twenty on Saturday night, his voice was sometimes as high as a man's voice can be, or as low and spooky as the baritone's chords can go, delivering a show with the intensity of a great rocker despite the fact that the songs he screamed and vociferated like a maniac had little to do with classic rock.
The band (Aaron Hemphill on percussion, guitar, synth, Julian Gross on drums) is a Los Angeles trio but became a quintet with two other guys on guitar and bass, and played with a rare energy and a true punk aggressiveness, producing a sort of experimental-noise-punk-rock, surprisingly populated by heavy dance beats.
But there were two kinds of songs, the truly pugnacious ones, all-senses-assaulting, that Andrew was yelling in our faces like an angry rapper, and the sluggish-slow ones quite hard to describe, sounding much more like ambiance songs than punk rock tunes, with a plaintive and dissonant delivery and some puzzling development including some dog-like cries. It was weird and dark at the same time, a sort of noisy psychedelic goth rock, quite enjoyable and then disconcerting a minute later.
I don’t know, there was a little bit of Nick Cave into that guy, may be it is because they were both born in Australia, may be it is just a coincidence, but his voice and frenetic presence was similar at times. He was gesticulating, making funny faces, or windmills with his arms, swallowing the mic, but his theatrical moves were letting the other band members totally impassible.
In this complex and moody Liars’ world, there were some powerful danceable beats, sometimes ending into a sort of ascending trance dance, and some long agonies exploding in a deranged tempest of distorted, strident, high-pitch electronic squeals.
According to what I could read on the small paper at Andrew’s feet, they played a few songs from their last album ‘Sisterworld’, like ‘Scissor’, ‘Proud Evolution’, ‘No Barrier Fun’ and ‘Scarecrows on a Killer Slant’, some from their 2007 ‘Liars’ album, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Clear Island’, and from what I could guess, ‘There’s Always Room on the Broom’, and ‘Broken Witch’ from their 2004 ‘They were wrong, So We Drowned’ album, ‘The Garden Was Crowded and Outside’ from their 2001 ‘They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top’ album! But they play more than that, and all these long wordy songs seemed to translate a deep irony carrying some provocative ideas.
Liars was astonishing live, creepy and funny at the same time. Andrew suddenly made an exit, thanking the crowd and I thought the show was over, but Hemphill discretely said ‘We have two more songs’, and with only the three of them (Andrew, Hemphill and Gross) on stage, they effectively continued playing two tunes, even weirder than the rest.