LIARS – They Threw us all in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top (Blast First/Mute Records)

With such brilliant music coming out of New York over the past couple of years, the marketing team have moved up a gear.  The promotion done for the city music scene has got people believing that everyone walking round New York is a funked up new waver ready to burst with beats, mascara and designer suits or a scruffy, hung over Stroke with a nice haircut.  There’s little to distinguish between bands, because people are making their minds up on how bands are marketed.  One group of artists categorised so it’s easier to sell to the kids are the funk punk groups trying to make the rock kids dance.  Radio 4, The Rapture and the Liars, if you believe the hype, are all the same.  But the truth is much more varied and complex.  Each of these bands are distinctly different, from The Raptures take on The Cure through Sean Ryder’s eyes to The Liars scary, hypnotic, ‘fuck with me and I’ll put a fork in your eyeball’ sound.

They Threw us in a Trench… is a strangely mixed album.  It’s not as hard on the ears as one might expect and at times it makes you want to dance, but it’s still a militant and sharp edged album that gives you the impression the Liars hate everyone, with the vocals snarled and spat out like a particularly angry and in-balanced Joe Strummer.  The Liars lull you into becoming friends with them one minute before destroying it all with We live in NE Compton which starts with a terrifying and echoing drum roll.  It bounces out of the speakers and around your brain before adding a piercing electronic noise and jumpy guitars that bully you into submission.  Unfriendly, but oddly satisfying.

Before all this, opener and fantastically titled Grown men don’t fall in the River just like that declares how the Liars have their “fingers on the pulse of America” and the electric atmosphere running through the song suggests they’ve got their finger on the national grid.  Whilst they’re still in a friendly mood they ask everyone to “wake up” to what’s happening in the country and it’s as close to the Liars declaring a revolution as it gets.  It then dissolves into the loudest and most chaotic funk I’ve ever heard, which would have any rock purist grooving and smiling, in a nasty kinda way of course.  Continuing on this course of making new pals Mr your on fire Mr is a DIY, cut n paste of strange beats that appear to be made by a glockenspiel and sounds distinctly 80’s, it then develops into a Clash and Specials battle before mixing it all together.  Just a bit good then.

After the unfriendly We live in NE Compton, the final track This dust makes that mud decides to change tack and give the listener something back, 30 minutes more in fact.  This dust… goes on and on and on and confuses the mind.  After ten minutes of the same bass hook and drum roll you deliberate over whether to switch it off, but after 12 your sure its changed slightly and after 17 its hypnotised, by which point you decide to stick it out and see what happens…nothing.  The song slows to a sudden stop after 30 minutes and strangely, even after several listens, it doesn’t get boring and I still can’t tell whether the formula changes or not.  This is dance music for a paranoid, rock n roll generation. Chris Parkin.