Liars
Mess
(Mute Records)
⋆⋆⋆⋆
The latest release from the Brooklyn-based three-piece band Liars recalls the London art-rockers These New Puritans's sterling second album Hidden, in which they swapped clever mid-naughties indie rock for a woodwind score laced with brash electronica. Mess is initially a dance album before veering off into abstraction and incoherence. Liars's effort is black, unfriendly and anarchic. Their lead singer Angus Andrew is somewhere between TNP's Jack Barnett and Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan, except with an affected laziness to his voice that adds to the band's fuzzy, indistinct aesthetic. Heavily distorted minor guitar samples provide the bass to the dance tracks, while suspiciously similar samples provide the backing to several. There are plenty of tech and industrial elements: witness the pleasingly evil soft techno track Darkside, which adroitly blends psychedelia and sub-bass, while the opener Mask Maker deploys a keyboard part that hums like one of Giorgio Moroder's synths possessed by malevolent spirits atop a disturbing answering machine vocal sample. Mess is an interesting if bleak experiment in imagining 1980s synth-pop – and drowning it in darkness.
