Liars Liars by: Ed Butler Tue:18-Dec-07 Label: Mute Year: 2007 WB rating 42 out of 100

Melancholy is a funny thing, if you'll pardon the pun. No matter what the art form, the manufacture of an air of misery is a fraught exercise. You're intentionally bringing your audience down, then asking them to enjoy and appreciate your creation. This is why our album and singles charts are stocked full of Bubles and Il Divos, who make listeners feel classy and cultured, Britneys and Christinas who make people tap their feet without taxing their intelligence or attention span, and Eagles and Rolling Stones, who let old people relive younger, happier times; it's easier to like something when you're feeling upbeat about it.

Liars, the New York/Berlin based three-piece, are carving their very own niche into that most difficult of musical genres: doom rock. And have no doubt that doom is everywhere on their fourth, self-titled long-player. It's in singer Angus Andrew's vocals, in the furiously distorted guitars (and percussion and bass), in the lyrics, hell, it's in the silent bits in between tracks. These guys want you to feel bad.

Not that there's anything really wrong with making music that is doom-laden. Radiohead have (until recently) built a career around it, Joy Division's legacy is founded on it, while Nine Inch Nails' 'March of the Pigs' showed us all how thrilling angst can be. And that's the yardstick. Misery can be magic, but it's in unleashing the inherent beauty, anxiety or thrilling exhilaration of being miserable that it succeeds.

So determined are Liars to be dark, depressing and anti establishment, that they forget this simple rule. They don't let you revel in your own misery, as the best exponents always have, creating an atmosphere where you can dwell, eyes closed, headphones on, in your darkest thoughts, safe and warm. With Liars, the misery is induced. They make you feel terrible.

Opening track, 'Plaster Casts of Everything', begins with a guitar riff that could best be described as driving, and at worst atonal and distracting. Propelled by a hammering rhythm section (Julian Gross' drumming, at times frenetic and forceful, other times disturbing and mysterious, is the unequivocal highlight of the album), the whole thing comes off as an underdone jam session. While the intent is there, it's more uncomfortable than genuinely distressing. 'What Would They Know' is a misanthropic, dissonant, clunking elegy, sounding like Joy Division on heavy sedatives. Sedatives that apparently induce a substantial loss of motor skills, judging by what can only be assumed is intentional guitar playing.

At the other end of proceedings, closer 'Protection' is a dirge-like, spoken word number, complete with requisite pipe organ. It's thoroughly depressing. However, the most notable comparison, 'Motion Picture Soundtrack', another funereal closing track, this time from Radiohead's Kid A, was strangely uplifting despite the pressing morbidity. 'Protection' sounds like a teenager's musical suicide note.

It’s not all bad, however. Two tracks stand out like gleaming beacons of possibility; 'Houseclouds' and 'Sailing to Byzantium' are two songs in the Hitchcock mould. Melodically, things tighten up and the listener is not forced into abject misery. Instead, there is a lurking menace behind 'Housecloud's’ 80s synth backing and Angus' creepy falsetto, like the bad guy waiting just out of frame. Any gloom is hidden, suggested, not smacking us in the face like a dead fish. It's great.

Liars clearly have no intention of ever entering the 'mainstream', but that’s no excuse for making songs that only occasionally and, it seems, incidentally, veer towards musicality. When attempts to retain product differentiation and an air of uniqueness come across as an amateur band with marginal control over their instruments, and a lack of tune, particularly when they show what they're really capable of, it's just frustrating, rather than morbidly depressing.