Into the top half of my list of top ten albums of the last decade with undoubtedly the weirdest one of the bunch.
#5
Liars
They Were Wrong, So We Drowned
[2004]
Before their second album appeared, Liars were kind of tagged with that “dance-punk” label, along with The Rapture, !!!, Radio 4 and so on. Listening to their first album, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, you can see why. The rhythm section had that tight, danceable groove. But there was definitely something a lot stranger and noisier going on.
This was made overwhelmingly clear in that album’s monumental last track ‘This Dust Makes That Mud’. It prowls menacingly for eight minutes, throwing in odd noises along the way. And then it locks into a short loop that repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats for another twenty-two minutes! It’s like an endurance test – the original, hipster Non-Stop Nyan Cat. I remember first listening to that song and – a couple of minutes into the looping part – wondering if I was going mad, or if my portable CD-player (those were the days, eh?) was broken.
There was a similar thing when I had They Were Wrong, So We Drowned playing while some friends and I played poker. The second track, ‘Steam Rose from the Lifeless Cloak’, came on and Ken asked if the CD was skipping. That track, though indeed repetitive, actually has more dynamic stuff going on in its looping. It’s also a much more merciful two minutes and fifty seconds.
In general They Were Wrong… is definitely more of a “difficult” listen than its predecessor. It’s noisier, more abrasive and just a whole lot stranger. And it wasn’t particularly danceable. The key reason for this was the departure of the first album’s bassist and drummer. Out went the locked-groove rhythm section and in came the more primitive, tribal stylings of Julian Gross. This caused a major shift in the sound of the band. Far more emphasis was now placed on texture rather than structure.
This shift was amplified by the band’s decision to make this a so-called “concept album”. The concept, in this case, was witches and witchcraft on the Brocken mountain in Germany. This, in turn, went hand-in-hand with the decision to record the album in the woods of New Jersey. The result was a collection of very earthy, visceral and spooky sounds and lyrics . Many reviews at the time billed it as a kind of musical equivalent to The Blair Witch Project. This association was not inappropriate.
I think all this is exemplified well in the video (directed by singer Angus Andrew’s then-girlfriend, Karen O) for the album’s second single ‘We Fenced Other Gardens with the Bones of Our Own’:
The notion of the concept album is frequently derided as being a whole load of pretentious bollocks. And often concept albums are. But one good thing about them is that they, almost necessarily, are cohesive pieces of work. The same themes run through the songs and help to tie it all together. And They Were Wrong… does this very well. It almost feels like getting lost in the woods, enveloped by these unknown sounds you’re unsure of whether to trust or not, before stumbling across some group of hooded figures performing a ritual sacrifice around a fire. Or something.
If there’s one song that sticks out slightly, it’s track three, ‘There’s Always Room on the Broom’. It’s probably the closest thing on the album to their earlier work – with more of a bouncier rhythm to it. Perhaps this is why it was chosen as the first single. But it’s still fairly insane. The main riff is gratingly noisy and the lyrics are bizarre. When I first came across it I was pretty baffled. And this was in no way helped by the erratic, epileptic video I was seeing:
The fact that this was at about two o’clock in the morning and I was watching the television in a completely darkened room in an empty house probably enhanced the confusion. It was crazy, but I absolutely loved it. The main riff sounded so wrong, but worked all the better because of it. And the playful-but-spooky chanting and ooh-ing – utilized through out the album – lodged itself in my head.
Having read about the recording in the woods and the story behind the album in advance, I was very eager to listen to it. And when I finally did, I was not disappointed.
Seeing them live for the first time, in May 2005, while they were touring this album, I was also quite excited. Though I was not entirely sure how they were going to translate the album to the stage. But they did. Brilliantly. That was, up till then, the best live performance I had ever seen. And very very very few gigs have impressed me even nearly as much since.
I think memories of that show probably unfairly influenced my decision to include the album the list. Many would argue that Liars’ follow-up to it, Drum’s Not Dead, is superior. And they’d have a point. Drum’s Not Dead is more fully-realized, more well-rounded and, heck, the individual songs are probably better. But it doesn’t have the boldness, the rawness or the purity of They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. …Which is probably just a real snobby, hipster-y, I-prefer-their-earlier-stuff kind of statement, I know. It’s probably just a bad habit I have – giving more value to the works that break the most ground, rather than the follow-ups that build on them: Fear of Music over Remain in Light, Pi over Requiem for a Dream, etc.
Or, yeah, maybe it’s because of that gig… But still, I don’t think it’s necessarily terrible to give extra credit to an album for what it achieved – on top of how it actually sounds. (I have a feeling I have in a previous post, or will in a future one, almost directly contradict myself on that – making some kind of good-music-is-just-music-that-sounds-good type of statement. Oh well…)
When I saw Liars live for the second time, in August 2010, when they were touring their fifth album, Sisterworld, they peppered their set with songs from Drum’s Not Dead - and even played one from the first album. But the highlight of the show – and the only time it really came close to that May 2005 – was the very last song of the evening, when they played the opening track from They Were Wrong…, ‘Broken Witch’. There really is nothing like ending a gig with the audience screaming “BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD!”.
(this video is from a different 2010 performance, but you get the idea…)
