You know the ones. Those gifted harlequins that prance wide eyed with devious smiles through napalm filled swamps of writhing horror and sparkling synthesized glitter bursts, past neon outlined mountains where confetti falls upwards and all around the sounds of madness are melting away all the boredom as if Cillit Bang became a day-glo purple Cloverfield monster and grimy dirt was New York City.
Some such ruffians of feral wonderment are our much beloved heroes of yelping moonlit pagan rave, Liars. We care not for naysayers who persecute our medieval forestmen for their Jesus & Mary Chain phase with the last self titled album, but that’s because Liars have a 20JFG Golden Key – which means they can do whatever the fuck they want and we will adore and squeal like teenyboppers. Besides, that album ruled anyways.
In a blink and you’ll miss it flash, Liars posted a series of unreleased tracks on their MySpace player. They ranged from dirge and drone meltdowns with Angus turning himself inside out in front of a microphone, and kitchen sink and all clatter-fests hammered across iron sheets under the watchful gaze of the 10th planet. We presume these tracks are what didn’t make the cut for last years album.
‘Cruel’ was a favourite of the bunch which launches Liars into the air with a glass statue shattering introductory tone and lands them somewhere between the hungry ghosts versus Cyclopean spiders sound of the second album and the mountain set witch apocalypse mantra of the third. The Mt. Heart Attack summer festival parade comes winding down the mountain with creeping percussive power that sinks the Sun into the sea and the steaming salty mists erode away the revellers.
‘Nihilist’ is the end of the world in shoe-gaze land, where the burnt bodies of Slowdive and the Cocteau Twins still smoulder in the bitter night air as ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ by Sonic Youth plays backwards quietly from a ruined shack and the rats vacate the destroyed city to begin new lives in the black leafed woods.
But a new entity has passed through us like a vaporous beast that worships at a Play-Doh monolith painted with splashes of blue and green paint by kids that hail from the bad villages on the enticingly evil side of town. Its Late Of The Pier!
We already testified our love for LOTP last September where we compared them to early incarnations of The Knife through to Pac-Man japes by way of Gary Numan. They have jabbed at the fun button so much now its just getting tiring so they’ve gone ahead and selotaped it down for a permanent party of cut-out cardboard disco masks and gowns fashioned from your mum’s green shoulder-padded 80’s suites and refuse collectors uniforms, all spattered with fluorescent paint slashes.
Late Of The Pier – The Bears Are Coming (Beyond The Wizards Sleeve Remix)
On ‘The Bears Are Coming’ prog rock is treated to the same happy accident when a ball of phosphorous acid-house light crashed into it as Klaxons arrived. But then on new remix 12″, Beyond The Wizards Sleeve send the track through a mangle made from the debris of the wicker man and we get a Summerisle day-trip to the darker regions of woodland that we didn’t get to see in the movie where percussion is played on the skulls of past victims and the main melodies played by a forest animal troupe reared on Test-Icicles and black-comedy Bruce Haack.
Check the new 12″ for proper space rock meets space disco with The Emperor Machine and demonic 8-bit sex thumps from Joakim.