The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

The music industry and press couldn’t get enough of telling us that summer 2007 belonged to the teenager. The broadsheets frothed over the supposed “phenomenon” of underage gigs and the legions of fresh-faced bands writing spasms of ADD for their MySpace profiles, then The Teenagers turned those years into songs all cheap deodorant and school disco erections.

Into this hormonal soup, late-20s trio Liars drop their fourth, eponymous album. After the trucker cap post punk posturing of their debut, after the witches, and the percussive, conceptual majesty of Drum’s Not Dead comes… a pop record, with guitar solos, choruses, brash exhortations described with short song titles like ‘Freak Out’. Liars is a record that - supposedly - makes a break from the conceptual and attempts to recreate, as Aaron Hemphill puts it, “a good feeling for the listener, so they can feel how we felt listening to music that inspired us when we were younger”.

It’s a bit-more-than-a-quarter-life crisis: “We’re not getting any younger,” says drummer Julian Gross, “and the older you get, the more you think back to adolescence and what was important then.”

“We were talking too about that period,” adds frontman Angus Andrews, “you don’t have a job, or rent, or politics, or any of these things to worry about, yet life still feels so dramatic. And there’s almost like a song that goes with it, because that’s what you’re latching onto - everything becomes poignant and romantic.”

Angus says Liars felt as if they needed a break from the strictures that the previous two albums put on their way of working: “It became quite rigid, not only for the listener but also for us. I think we ended up talking more about the ideas than the actual music. This time it wasn’t because the band were interested in witches, or recording in a weird studio in Berlin… everything was pared down to have the focus on the songs.”

But Angus isn’t paying Liars previous work fair dues. They Were Wrong, So We Drowned allowed for a euphoric escape into a netherworld of high camp evil, the witches like the seventies prop-cupboard harridans of Polanski’s Macbeth. Drum’s Not Dead was more expansive and elusive, but still - especially live - made up of moments of thrilling sonic excess and liberating cacophony. “That’s completely valid,” agrees Angus. “Screaming, ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ in someone’s face is pretty primal and it’s not about being intellectual.”

Yet there’s no doubt that Liars is a more direct record, and certainly more accessible. It was written and recorded quickly, for a start, and with none of the label-inflicted delays that affected Drum’s Not Dead. And so you have the blustering, JAMC-referencing ‘Freak Out’, the blasé/suicidal lilt of ‘Houseclouds’, the lusty desperation of ‘Plaster Casts Of Everything’, and the simple longing of ‘Protection’, which closes the album with the most explicit reference to teenage love - an ode to a girl who “taught me how to drink”.

Referencing his love of Suede’s extravagance, Aaron says the songs stem from the drama that Liars sought to tap into. “You need to find the good place to draw inspiration from,” he explains. “I think melodramatic material is essential in surviving, and again it’s part of the less intellectual or academic aspirations we had with this record.”

Andrews takes up the thought: “We’d obviously done records in the past which contained a lot of information about an idea or an approach. This time it was much less focused in that way. All that concern about what should be there, that was all thrown away. So, whatever goes, whatever works for this song, works for this song. We were allowed to do whatever we wanted.”

But then again, Angus says he hasn’t “changed that much” since his teenage years, and his mind still works in a similar way. While the other two had what might be classed as standard slacker American upbringings (Julian “ran around drawing on buildings and skating”; Aaron “surfed a lot and did a lot of drugs”), Angus felt marooned in Australia, yearning for escape. “You’d think about the music you were listening to, but you’d also think about what you were thinking about. I was in Australia, on the other side of the world, and I wanted to get out in the world. Drum’s Not Dead was still escapism, but in a slightly less joyous way. But definitely when I was a kid I had that youthful optimism that anything could happen. I said to my parents, ‘You know that no matter what I do, I’m not going to end up in a gutter somewhere, and if that’s the bottom line, then that’s all cheese, no worries.’ I always felt like that when I was young, and it was just a matter of waiting.”

It’s a wait that’s paid off. Liars cements the band’s reputation as one of the most forward thinking of our times, never afraid to rip up their own rulebook, not to mention everyone else’s. They achieve that holy grail of being pioneering, adventurous and fun, especially when you see one of their hypnotic live shows. And, in a way, by ditching the witches and drums and deliberately aiming to create a “feeling”, Liars have made their most conceptual record to date. After all, most bands spend their careers desperately trying to paddle away from the looming icebergs of their obvious influences. Surely you can’t get much more brave in terms of an idea than turning the good ship Liars right towards them?

“Our goal is always to keep it challenging for ourselves,” says Angus. “The idea of writing something that (a) is more traditional and (b) could possibly sound like someone else is really foreign to us. It seems much more natural to go outside of the box. This was us coming to grips with the things you really love about music and trying to be part of it, and that, for us, is really abstract.”

And so the simple and emotional become theoretical, and maybe we’re back where we began. Aaron says it certainly wasn’t any easier to record Liars: “In fact it was a lot more frightening. Through the process we probably applied a lot more thought and conceptual planning to achieve something that sounded unplanned. It was really scary and endless.”

“The idea of a blues riff is more foreign to us than the idea of a big noise,” adds Angus. “So, like Aaron said, it was very frightening, because you’re tapping into something that’s very common among people - you’re treading on things that have been done, and that’s very scary, I think. It had always seemed easier, or more natural, to try and break up anything that was familiar.”

More content of interest...

• International Songbirds (Posted in 017 June 2008 | Songbirds)