Now, this particular correspondent first came in contact with Liars a few months ago at the top of a bill featuring, in support, two of the best live bands on the go right now or anytime at all in the near past, Mclusky and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It was like following electric shock treatment with a limp Chinese burn. Naturally they fell flat on their collective face. But not only that, it was like they’d done it on purpose, sent a clip into You’ve Been Framed and then nominated themselves for a Perrier Award. They were mechanical, directionless, cocksure, wannabe-humourists with nothing better to back it up with than a loose garage-funk car crash. Only one where you got up close and realised that it wasn’t even that exciting, nothing that half an hour at Kwik Fit would fix.
But there’s nothing like a ridiculous album title to give a band a pre-qualified second chance now is there. But forget about the album title and whatever arty pretexts it’s aiming at (if any at all) and just clock a look at the song titles themselves: ‘Grown Men Don’t Fall In The River Just Like That’, ‘The Garden Was Crowded And Outside’, ‘Why Midnight Walked But Didn’t Ring Her Bell’ and so on and so forth. It’s unnecessarily verbose literary bastardisation, and that we like. It may not mean anything at all, it could mean more than we’ll ever understand. We don’t know and we don’t care as it at least suggests an eccentricity that is only likely to become extinct through scene-sandpapering as more straight-faced, straight-laced, no-brainers line up to add their pocket change to this popularity cycle of garage-rock.
So ‘Grown Men Don’t Just Fall In The River Like That’ (we’re not tiring of saying these) starts off with a sedated Sonic Youth drawl, sagging in all the right places, before exploding with a alt-funk lobotomy that reminds of Primus, Bad Brains and their ilk and characterises the tone of the record. Except it’s not at all as gnawing and geeky as it should be for that, though that is the reason it intermittently drags. There is a performance busting out from the hard centre of all these songs. ‘Mr You’re On Fire Mr’ steps it up further with infectious woodpecker percussion and the lengthy limbs and wide faces of pre-‘Blood Sugar…’ Chilli Peppers. And the mask doesn’t drop as we thought it might from that brief live encounter. The jagged chants of ‘We Live NE of Compton’ are irresistible and ‘The Dust That Makes The Mud’ is the spaced 30 minute jam that Rage Against The Machine never got out their systems. It turns out to be better than fellow hardcore funks The Rapture anyway. First impressions, eh?