video review: 'mess' by liars (RETRO REVIEW)

Huh, I wish this was better. Ah well...

Next up is the new Sundy Best record - hoping they pull off two in one year. Stay tuned!

album review: 'mess' by liars (RETRO REVIEW)

And now we're coming to the part of the year where I talk about artists and albums I might have otherwise missed throughout the course of the year and just never got the chance to really discuss. The biggest reason why these reviews tend to be as late as they are is fairly simple: they've either slipped the net, fallen off my schedule, or have such lengthy, complicated discographies that it makes talking about them at length a real endeavor.

And that's before we get to a band like Liars, a LA band that has only two consistent elements: a dark, menacing, groove-driven sound, and the fact that they'll keep evolving and pushing said sound in weird directions. They're a band that's infamous for making left turns, and thus expecting any sort of consistency from them was doomed the second they dropped They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and alienated a massive chunk of their fanbase. From there, they got noisier, darker, and heavier with their krautrock-inspired Drum's Not Dead, the more spacious and brutish self-titled album, or the warped, more gothic side of Sisterworld. They then followed it with WIXIW in 2012... which I didn't really love. The choice to go for more stiff, brittle electronic-inspired rhythms just wasn't to my taste, and while it is a subtle record, the songwriting didn't really grip me either. It was also a record that eschewed some of the darkness of earlier work, which for me was a slight misstep - I like Liars when they get surreal and creepy and ominous, and while there was that brand of feeling coming from WIXIW, it was muted to the album's detriment.

So when I heard about Mess, I was intrigued, not just by the critical acclaim but by the fact that the recording was apparently very different, a lot more confident and strident. And given that Liars can make some genuinely thrilling music, I was definitely interested - what did we get here?