Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / CUK Kino Šiška / Slovenia
Concert date: 20.10.2014
Attendance: 150
Ticket price: 10,00€
Los Angeles-based electro-punk eccentrics Liars are yet another musical oddity who, abroad, have earned serious popularity, recognition and respect through the hard graft of six releases and a freshly released seventh album, »Mess«. A grotesque head-on crash, or a happy collision, of garage punk nihilism and dance-rhythm prosthetics rarely sounds as unusual, let’s just say »off the wall«, as when the talk turns to the music of Liars. Over years of defiance and their own particular musical evolution, this band thoroughly replaced, or let’s rather say branched out (and refined) the often predictable picture of garage rock punk dilettantism with the aesthetics of electronic soundscapes. On their current European tour promoting the album »Mess«, they stopped on a lovely October day at the temple of alternative rock culture, CUK Kino Šiška
The gig in the smaller venue on the ground floor of Kino Šiška, in the commune, that is, seemed ideal given the musical character the band cultivates. A solid crowd squeezed into the room, around 200 heads hungry to switch their minds off. The most fervent devotees of the band, crammed themselves right into the core of the front rows, up against the very front of the stage, to get as close as possible to the towering vocalist and knob-twiddling enthusiast, Angus Andrew . The extravagant singer stepped onto the stage draped in a Dalai Lama-style robe, hood up, and for the occasion he had combed his long wheat-straw hair forward over his eyes, so his appearance doubled as a symbol of the band’s new album cover. He kicked off their hour-and-ten-minute show with the new song Pro Anti Anti. The other two liars in the lineup also made sure to look the part on stage: multi-instrumentalist Aaron Hemphill looked like Pippi Longstocking without the braids, while drummer Julian Gross, in a »sweatshirt«, gave off the vibe of a hiker who has just come down from a tough climbing route.
The seasoned band put things in their place pretty quickly. Most of the attention went to Angus with his stage antics, setting off all sorts of deviant screams, growly chirping and other throat-mangled voices, as well as lower-pitched vocal »mimicry«. The vocalist liked to store such deviations in memory and, with the help of a delay effect, thicken the band’s multilayered sonic escapism, firmly tilted toward a tripped-out, hypnotically staring climax. While Gross mercilessly, yet very precisely, hammered the snare and, together with programmed rhythmic loops, dictated a tempo that was sharp throughout but firmly inclined toward dance moves, the »colorful Easter egg« Hemphill and the »white ghost« Andrew built a one-of-a-kind backdrop that fused a proper collision of noisy curtains of sampled synthesizing and programmed loops. In the grand finale, Hemphill picked up a guitar for three songs (Plaster Casts of Everything, and in the encore Beach and Broken Witch) and likewise, through the vise of sampling, memorized a few phrases and loaded them into »feedback« delay reflections to create a multifaceted sound picture. The crowd was represented by an especially fired-up group of fans who knew the songs and their choruses by heart and threw themselves with great zeal into the energy the Liars’ performance created. Somewhere in the middle of the gig, Angus had trouble with his mic, which croaked. He temporarily grabbed Hemphill’s microphone and used it to handle the situation, which the resourceful sound tech sorted out in no time with bold and diligent speed.
In a theatrical finish, Angus knocked over two laptop stands with the sampling machinery and, as Broken Witch wound down, theatrically toppled over the drummer’s tom-tom straight into Gross’s lap, where he theatrically stayed put. And with that, the show was over. A concert of top-notch shock therapy, where you often don’t know what’s happening on stage amid the crowd of swaying noises and loops shot through with a solid kinetic form of rhythms that force bodies to flail freely and switch every thought off. The short and sweet stay in this world of musical eccentricity flew by in a flash. As a proper live show should. So Liars gave the crowd exactly what it came for that night. A great stage show. A one-of-a-kind catapult blast into a parallel world of electro-punk dance extravagance with the charm of neurotic nihilism.
Setlist
1. Pro Anti Anti
2. Mask Marker
3. Barrier
4. Vox Tuned D.E.D.
5. Wixiw
6. I’m No Gold
7. Can’t Hear Well
8. No 1 Against the Rush
9. Mess On A Mission
10. Brats
11. Plaster Casts of Everything
—encore—
12. Beach
13. Broken Witch
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