New Liars Al bum

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

Ha, I bought Sisterworld today too!

Seeing them on the 19th, can't wait.

http://devonrecordclub.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/liars-wixiw-round-39-nicks-choice/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf1fbu7zLII

cool.

fantastic

album is gonna be hot.

yes, more pls

That's fucking awesome.

second album trailer (featuring a different song, i think)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnb4A-Cumsc

crappy techno

oh man i love this even more than the other new song. that slicing processed-horn or synth sound is killer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9ArnXsZMHk

can't wait for this thing to be released.

full album streaming now!

this is really good.

daaaamn i want to listen to this but no time for like the next three days

i'm interviewing aaron tomorrow. looking forward to it.

i try not to listen to streams but couldn't resist. this is really good, and a nice progression from WIXIW (which I ended up loving).

this might be their weirdest album in years, which is good

i don't know if i'd throw "weirdest album" around, but this is really good -- evolution of the sounds & atmospheres first mined on WIXIW, but with a much heavier club influence. i feel like this is their true electro album...and can't wait to see what their next left-turn is, stylistically.

worked at the record store this weekend, and sold the first one to a kid who said, "this sounds like marilyn manson."

...i have not let that that ruin the record for me.

weirder than the self-titled and Wixiw, maybe? That's all I meant.

weird is one of my highest words of praise

i'll go for that :)
must've skipped over the "recent"
definitely a big tonal shift towards ambient/soundscape/drone stuff over the last third of the record

i like 'boyzone' as a song title

This isn't very good. It's probably the least memorable of all their albums. Still it gets a free pass from all the places you'd expect (Quietus, Fact, etc).

I'm not much of a depeche mode fan or of the other such programmed beat oriented groups they are imitating or mocking here, so I wonder if I should even bother (I have liked some of what they did earlier in their time together)

I've only listened to it a couple of times so far but I think this is great. I LOVE Mess On A Mission; most exciting single / song / track / whatever I've heard so far this year. They seem to have followed the course they set with Brats on WIXIW, which I'm delighted with because I loved that track.

having trouble parsing curmudgeon's post but that Mute Audio Documents comp is kind of fun and seeing Liars on Mute in that scope is kind of fun

I was referencing this from the NPR writeup:

the new album embraces the type of electro-pop that underpins the catalog of the band's parent label, Mute. Throughout the early 1980s, Mute Records built its brand on the likes of Depeche Mode, Erasure and Yaz. On songs like "Vox Turned D.E.D." and "Can't Hear Well," Andrew uses his baritone to mimic the icy intonations of these hallmark acts, the gothic synth chord changes of Hemphill and Gross following suit. "I'm No Gold" even finds Liars doing Adult.-esque electro.
Some of the Europop moves on Mess are so spot-on that one gets the feeling that Liars are taking the piss.

yeah, depeche mode of that era != depeche mode of any era since

Two albums of quite a similar aesthetic in a row is a long pisstake.

But not beyond them.

Yeah, I would say this is a palette of sounds they like, not any sort of pisstake.

I mean, unless They Were Wrong, So We Drowned was supposed to be one, too

Belatedly listening to this. It actually reminds me a bit of Shy Child, which is not something I ever thought I would say of a Liars album.

I'm sure it's from a similar synth patch, but I heard "Mask Maker" in Chipotle today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgtISVfW2TE

and over the din it was very reminiscent of Hysterix "Talk to Me"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNSrrXjJ71Y

i completely forgot about these guys. i loved They Were Dead... and Drums Not Dead but they lost me with the s/t. listening to both of those records now for the first time in years and they're still so beautiful...

https://consequenceofsound.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/liars-tfcf.jpg?quality=80&w=806