“IT’S THE REINVENTION OF CONSUMPTION,” SAYS gross. “That’s what everyBody’s trying to do right now.” magazine Wired and open for just a few weeks, the place looked like a cracked-out, picked-over version of The Sharper Image: $50 synthesizers, custom-made Corvettes, $7,000 speakers that look like nineteenthcentury diving equipment, old video games for sale on eBay, sneakers made of recycled junk, tents, and camp gear all littering a six-thousand-square-foot space with no apparent rhyme or reason. They find the place fascinating, but it’s just part of a larger conversation that’s moving quickly: other topics include the zinc content of energysaving light bulbs, Green Label Sound, a record label owned by Mountain Dew, and websites that will pay bands for the rights to premiere the band’s music videos. “It’s the reinvention of consumption,” Julian Gross, the band’s drummer, explains. “That’s what everybody’s trying to do now.” That idea—the reinvention of consumption —is a hot topic these days, especially for musicians. Everybody, from artists to labels to publicists, is trying to figure out how to survive. There is a lot of emphasis on fluidity and adaptability, and people outside the music business assume that older bands like Liars are not going to make it. They aren’t flexible enough, the thinking goes. They’re used to the old way. But one of the defining elements of Liars’ career has been adaptability. Time and again, they have changed their creative process and their lives to respond to challenges. As entertaining a subject as the Wired store is, I’m here to discuss Sisterworld, their outsized, violent, cinematic fifth album. According to press releases and the like, Sisterworld is about the disturbed, psychic underbelly of Los Angeles. In teaser videos released online, the band looks like urban professionals who have somehow gotten
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stuck in the woods, the pleats rumpled and sweated out of their dress slacks, dirt and grime streaked across their faces and once-white collars, branches-cumwalking sticks completing the look. To people who know the band only by reputation, it probably looks like another one of their weird, high-concept blurts. There is a strange disconnect between press clippings written about them and the band’s own bio, in which the former casts Liars as abstract, arty recluses while the latter describes a band doing its best to react to life’s strains. Sisterworld’s sound has been determined by concrete, practical, normal things, just like every other album Liars has made with its current lineup of singer/ guitarist Angus Andrew, bass/synth player Aaron Hemphill, and drummer Julian Gross. For example, their second album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, is frequently described as an unlistenable drone haunted by obscure references to pagan rituals. But while the band was recording They Were Wrong at a house in the woods of New Jersey back in 2003, lead singer Angus Andrew was simply struggling with Iraq mania—just like everybody else. “I was just a little too into it,” Andrew explains. “It was when we were attacking Iraq, finding Saddam, and I was just glued to the TV. I was just feeling really overwhelmed by how ensconced I was in all that.” A lot was made of They Were Wrong’s concept (the album is, by the band’s own admission, about the nature of fear in society) and arcane references to Walpurgisnacht, a pagan ritual that survives, in assorted forms, across northern Europe. Those references, along with They Were Wrong’s corroded, synth-based sound, were mostly viewed by critics as the result of overreaching ambition—an arty band overdosing on its own pretensions. But back in 2003, when post-9/11 malaise seemed to poison and distort new aspects of American culture every month, with the chatter about weapons of mass destruction never-ending and the hunts for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein all-consuming, the band preferred to use a closed system of symbols and signifiers as a proxy for the war’s nightmarish effects. To those same critics, They Were Wrong’s follow-up, Drum’s Not Dead, seemed even more obtuse: a concept album that pitted the two sides of the creative process against each other. Under the circumstances, it was also the only album the band could have made. After Andrew managed to unglue himself from CNN’s everevolving, never-informative coverage, he and his band fled to Berlin, and they drank in the isolation. “I would try to pretend I wasn’t American when I was there,” Gross says. For the most part, it worked. “People usually thought I was Turkish.” But because nobody in the band spoke German, and nobody in their recording studio (which was only accessible by boat) spoke English, the language barrier began to loom large. Each artistic decision, simply because of the struggles it would set in motion, had to be agonized over, both individually and collectively. But rather than falter, the band embraced the challenges Berlin presented.