Music Review of They Were Wrong, So We Drowned

(mute)

Sheesh, talk about a worthless album. Not since all those Sonic Youth noise records have I been clobbered over the head with something so disappointingly unlistenable and uninspired. At least the folks behind SY had the decency to release that shit under a different name and label, admitting from the outset that the meager effort they put in wasn’t worth the same respect or attention as their real music. Listening to this Liars drivel you’d think it was a different band playing than the one behind They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, and you wouldn’t even be that wrong because half of the original members hightailed it in the interim.

Like a nervous married couple who refuse to try for another baby after their first miscarriage, band leaders Angus Andrew and Aaron Hemphill decided to go it without a bass player and create an experimental record that wears its “challenging” nature like a merit badge. It’s supposed to be a defiant sendoff, I think, to the fans who liked their good music, and a snide mealy-mouthed pout of “we don’t need no dang bass player!” that sounds more like “We knew we couldn’t top our first album so we just didn’t try” by the time the last “song” fades out in a two minute wash of bird sounds.

Leaving out the low end, naturally, was a wise move for a band whose best trait has always been its lightning quick rhythm section, and now that it’s all smoky drum machines and forest imagery, shit’s just so much fun you wouldn’t even believe. Indeed, the fastest song on the whole record is “Hold And It Will Happen Anyway” and even that crawls like a dying, epileptic tortoise.

There’s a story behind all the tracks too, about a witch-hunt and a Neverending Story type “nothing” that eats up the countryside and makes everybody crazy. It’s a cool concept, but I never saw folks dancing to no concepts before. But then it seems that’s the point. Ugly Angus is an artist and it’s not his job to stir your feet. What a self-important joke. Anyone who demands respect like this does not deserve it.

There are no real songs on this CD, by the way. They forgot to put in melodies. Only on “Flow My Tears the Spider Said” is there an inkling of variation in cadence, and unless my ears are deceiving me, they lifted it wholesale (of all things!) from an old Death Cab song.

The rest can’t even qualify as wild and freeform noise-rock because even though it goes nowhere and carries no trace of direction or heart, it’s still completely linear, structured and claustrophobic.

The only part that really sticks out is the a capella breakdown in “We Fenced Other Gardens With the Bones of Our Own,” which is the best song on the album until it gets turned into a go-nowhere instrumental, at which point the arrow that drove the first two thirds forward gets lost in a stuffy kind of sandbox and everything becomes horrible.

In conclusion, I would not be so sad if Liars got hit by cars.