News / / 10.03.14

LIARS

Mess (Mute)
13/20

After 14 years and six albums we’re still never sure what to expect from New York’s noisiest threesome. One thing that’s always been a part of Liars is their propensity to write music that can shock and scintillate in equal measure. Despite not representing a huge departure from their last curveball WIXIW in terms of sound palette, Mess, delivers in that context for two reasons: first off it’s a pop record – albeit industrially tainted – and secondly, it sounds like it’s dropped seven years too late.

All that aside, it’s probably the most accessible record they’ve released and is even more electronic than 2012’s very electronic offering. The haunting Can’t Hear Well is a stark, despondent piece of synth driven minimalism and serves as the album’s strongest song, while the oddly titled Boyzone sees the band plumbing the depths of their experimentalism, riffing on a gothic, mechanised structure which stands up against the current crop of industrial upstarts but somehow manages to fall back on the slightly out of date sound of NYC circa 2005 at the same time. At other times, on I’m No Gold for example, the album ditches the bleak factory atmosphere and veers almost completely into MSTRKRFT territory. It sounds miserably stale.

Mess is an achievement for Liars on some levels. The fact that some parts of the record sound like Rammstein collaborating with Justice is not something to be sniffed at and Pro Anti Anti is a certified monster in that particular, errm, genre. It’s a good record, but if it’s not fearless and it’s not snarling, it’s not what we want from Liars.

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Words: Billy Black

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