Tuesday, March 25, 2014

#1182 Liars - Mess

Liars albums have always had a smattering of thrilling, perfect, noisy post-post-punk songs peaking out from a sea of admirable but deeply boring, falsetto-drenched noise experiments. But its telling that their 1st-2nd-3rd-4th-5th albums contribute 4-3-2-2-1 songs, respectively, to my Fun Liars mix. Returns be diminishing.

While I don't think they'll ever top their debut, this is the pinnacle of post-TTUAIATASAMOT output, all that experimental drone wrapped into dancable shapes: all that hypnosis and tension used to make your body move, a menacing, wooly, wholly engaging pile of beats and drones and moans. The first half is hugely listenable, especially lead single Mess on a Mission. It's not quite as mindblowing in the highlights as their previous albums, heck, at least it represents something you can actually put on and *enjoy* for more than a track at a time. The second half disappears again, but by then you might actually have been soothed into it.

I might like this because it feels like the payoff for years of suffering through interesting and awful Liars songs, but I do like it a hell of a lot 4/5

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