New Liars Al bum

cheers contenderizer. i like it well enough.

a lot of people are amazed by it. i just think it's okay.

don't seem to be a lot of folks around here amazed by it, just me. do love it though. listened to it a bunch yesterday. said it reminded me of the cat people theme, and it does, but radiohead's obviously in there too. only complaint i have is that it sort of fizzles at the end.

it's v. good imo

i saw a few people commenting on loving it on my facebook but maybe i'm just virtual friends with the right people. i'm liking it more and more as it happens.

"only complaint i have is that it sort of fizzles at the end."

yeah it seems like a track that's going to GO APE but doesn't. i'm sure that's a deliberate choice on their part, though.

i think it's great! i'm excited to hear the rest of the album, too. the recent pitchfork interview suggested that it would be heavily electronic, which sounds wonderful to me.

Who is producing WIXIW? A while back there was some kind of blog post where they dropped some cryptic remarks about some big shot producer.

Daniel Miller.

They are such a great band, I love them.

Sisterworld was great

Soundcloud is back:
http://soundcloud.com/muterecords/liars-no-1-against-the-rush

SiN Machine 3 days ago
Like David Sylvian let loose with a shit drum machine.....interesting

The album's great.

Sort of a bit new radiohead-y and a bit Mount Heart Attack-y and a bit pop.

yes plz

this is great. agree that it fizzles towards the end but ive come to realize that subtlety when it comes to electronic based music always tends to win out in the end. they could have gone for some ridic crescendo/climax and it would have sounded overdone come 5 years. the tone is what they got right here and thats all i can ask for.

I have a good feeling about this record

Love this song! I like the mix of the pretty backing track and the discordant organ bit. There's a terrifying video now also.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggR6RuBh8I0

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153520354/first-listen-liars-wixiw
Halfway through, I'm enjoying what I hear. A lot.

the single and the opening track are both exactly the sound i didn't know i always wanted liars to make.

Holy crap that opener is gorgeous.

This is really really good. The first 5 tracks especially.

this is so good

Love this record, btw.

"Brats" is killer

This is one of the most horrible things I have ever heard.

Why do you say that?

To me it's just so ultimately... contemptuous-seeming and ugly. It's just an ugly slog of disparate pieces that don't mesh. It doesn't have any climactic moments. It sounds joyless and dead, and his sarcastic singing voice makes every song sound like a joke. Also, each song pretty much ends in the same place that it started.

I wanted it to be beautiful, but it managed only a clatter of signifiers of beauty.

drum's not dead still holds up imo

It's holding up a corner of my coffee table right now.

ba dum bum

I listened to this album again this morning and it's great

there are a few tracks that are kind of boilerplate liars on the WIXIW but also a few really great tracks - no. 1 against the rush and a ring on every finger are amazing

Not sure what to make of this. I'm listening to it a lot, and enjoying it, but it seems so in thrall to Kid A, Amnesiac era Radiohead at points as to almost be pastiche. One song bites Cuttooth so hard, and he sings so much like Thom so often, that I don't know if its got its tongue in its cheek.

I don't quite get a radiohead vibe off of the album, but I definitely see where you're coming from.

Sick, you asked me what I thought about this record?

(Don't know if I'm just your ~representative RH fan~ or something)

Anyway. Yeah, I can hear a Radiohead-y kind of vibe to the music, but it's more that it just seems to be doing the same kind of '00s cusp indietronica thing. There was a song that sounded exactly like an Appliance song on there as well. For the most part, I quite like the music, the instrumentation is the kind of wibble I like and the arrangements keep my attention well. (I only skipped one song! This is p good.)

BUT.

I disagree that the singer is biting Thom Yorke. If he is, I wish he would do a better job. The problem is, too many indie singers hear Thom doing that thing where he doesn't enunciate and he slurs his consonants in a rush to get to the vowels - and think that's all there is to it. So they mumble along - without realising that what makes Thom such a great singer isn't his lack of enunciation, but his ability to *emote* so that the emotional quality of his voice becomes as important if not more important than than the actual words he's singing.

The singer of this band just kind of mumbles along in a monotone and never really shows much emotion of any kind, he just comes across as lazy. Which is a shame because I actively liked the music on several songs - Octagon and Brats seemed like they could have been quite decent tunes if he'd put some effort in.

That is kind of the exact inverse of what I like about both singers! I like Yorke's voice but sometimes the delivery just seems kind of overblown and I don't quite buy the emoting! I wish the new Liars album was a bit less falsetto-heavy, though, and kind of prefer the drudgey vocal parts.

doesn't enunciate and he slurs his consonants in a rush to get to the vowels

I never noticed Thom Yorke's midwestern america accent until now :)

Didn't hear any falsetto on this album?

besides a few moments in the vocals (and that's maybe almost coincidence, i think andrew has his own thing going on that's not remotely yorke-imitation) i'm not really reminded of radiohead, it sounds more like a natural development for they were wrong so we drowned-vibe liars going more electronic. maybe a bit of a surface reading on too few listens, but the main thing i'm getting from it is something like a very sensible meeting between that era of liars and blackest ever black, demdike stare etc-type stuff, or maybe that natural development just naturally ends up there.

xxp angus andrew is australian!

iirc "Ill Valley Prodigies" and the one a couple tracks later have some falsetto

Oh. Ill Valley Prodigies was the one I ended up skipping. Oops.

I repeat, I don't think they're biting Radiohead or whatever, just operating in a similar area.

Boys mumble all over the world, it's not confined to the American Midwest or the Upper Thames Valley.

nah, I meant the vowel elongation, as we midwesterners prooonoouunce eeveery vahhoowel

There are just a handful of (maybe only 2) very specific moments where it sounds like he's singing Yorke lyrics / melodies. One where he sings something very similar to the refrain of Cuttooth - "I don't know why I feel so [something something]" and the rhythm of the delivery is very similar. There's another as well but I'd have to be listening to it to recall it.

Just now listening to this. I can take or leave Liars depending on the particular album, but I definitely approve of WIXIW.

I guess I can kind of hear the post-millenial Radioheadisms mentioned upthread, but the similarities are just on the fringes imo.

Listened to this about four times in a row yesterday whilst driving across Dartmoor. It was a beautiful day.

This isn't a beautiful album. It's crawling. It's quite desperate, and angry, but subdued. Possibly misantrhopic at points. There are some moments when light breaks through, but not many. Brats is savage. I feel like they're trying to make a point but I'm not sure what about.

Just got Sisterworld. Awesome. Really woozy, unsettling mix and arrangements, like a rock band melted. This band have clicked hard for me in the last six months.

i'm going to need to revisit sisterworld which i never really liked the first time around. but wixiw is really awesome, almost everything i want from liars.

fact magazine have a preview of a Vessel remix of one of the wixiw tracks, pretty bleak