Liars

21st October 2012, Sound Control

7/10

A Liars gig is not something you can invite all of your friends to. This band is much too weird. A mix of rock, dance, punk and madness. Their show at Sound Control, in the beautiful, graffiti-adorned New Wakefield Street, left no doubt about that.

They chose a very weird support band, for a start. The guy is called The Haxan Cloak. I guess the word coming closest to describing his music would be “noise”. A dark creepy video is playing on the side of the stage, electronic sounds fill the space, most people are pretty motionless. This whole gig looks like a contemporary art exhibition. Or some kind of avant-garde club night for drug dealers. At least it’s original. You’re dead exhausted by the end of it. Totally prepared for Liars’ own kind of weirdness.

You can’t totally hate Liars. The singer’s crazy and his hair’s a mess. It makes people enthusiastic. Not that there were many people that night though.  The first songs were all electronic. Then they got the drums in. Later they played some more guitar-based songs, which were actually really good. Their encore songs, ‘The Other Side of Mt Heart Attack’ and ‘Broken Witch’, were particularly good too. But on the whole, it was far from a rock concert. It wasn’t about beautiful vocals either. Most of the time, the singer Angus Andrew sounds like he doesn’t know shit about singing. That’s not really what they’re looking for. He’s much cooler when he yells or dances around in a drunken way. When a more downbeat kind of song kicks off and you realize that he can actually sing, it’s quite a nice revelation though. Anyway their music is far from conventional beauty. It’s experimental, it’s noisy, it’s varied, it’s fun.