Liars - Sisterworld (Mute) 08/03/10

I’ve been to L.A. once, and I can’t say I was overly enamoured by the place. It fucking sprawls, heading outward in so many directions at once that it’s hard to conceptualise as a single city. Instead, to my fifteen-year-old self it felt like a series of separate centres, nodes of manic activity interspersed with long stretches of relative calm. It’s also blistering hot in the summertime, adding to that strange impression it gives of existing as an urban desert. Liars’ new album was recorded in L.A, and its sonic signature is stamped all over it. After the Zen-like dissociation of Drum’s Not Dead and the back-to-basics nature of their self-titled follow-up – both of which were recorded in Berlin, and shared a chillier sound palette – Sisterworld aches with a deathly pallor, even its least perverse moments tinted with a faint sickly yellow.

This is entirely a good thing. Liars have always been best at their most depraved, during their blackly comic witchhunt opera They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, or Angus Andrew’s unhealthy falsetto on ‘It Fit When I Was A Kid’. Opener ‘Scissor’ can immediately be added to the list. The slightly offkey harmonies and Andrew’s baritone opening lines recall Nick Cave’s convincing southern gothic – in fact, the entire album shares a similar atmosphere to Cave’s debut novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel. ‘No Barrier Fun’s queasy strings and mumbles of “I wanna make it up / I wanna make my skin adapt to the sun / No barrier fun”, and the sudden outbursts of violence that pockmark ‘Scarecrows On A Killer Slant’ both evoke that book’s ever-shifting hallucinatory reality.

‘Here Comes All The People’ is a fever dream set to a nightmarish arabesque swirl, as whispered voices ambush from either side like hideous subconscious outpourings. Wherever and whatever Sisterworld is, it’s a terrifying place – perhaps the album’s altered states are beginning to tap into the spirits of L.A’s astral plane. A little like David Lynch with Mulholland Drive, Liars seem to be able to look just behind the glitz and glamour to the dark, slowly beating heart just beneath. The gorgeous, haunted drones of ‘Goodnight Everything’ are testament to that, as their beauty gradually falls away to be replaced by slowly churning doom riffs. As an inversion of reality it’s bracing, and like the best of their music takes several listens to fully absorb and understand. Nonetheless, it’s a worthwhile trip: Sisterworld could well prove to be Liars’ finest work yet, and it stands up there alongside Drum’s Not Dead as a unique vision of how far you can push the definition of rock music before it snaps entirely.