Liars

When Liars released They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top in 2002, they appeared to be a juggernaut of vociferous, danceable potential. "Mr. You’re on Fire Mr.” was one of the best singles of that year and their indefatigable live shows converted the undecided into sore, dehydrated believers. We wanted more. Instead, we got less. Their sophomore effort, We Were Wrong So We Drowned, was an inscrutably errant concept album recorded in a shack in New Jersey. You couldn’t dance to it partially because you could barely listen to it. With Drum’s Not Dead, Liars fulfil the correlation between the length of their albums’ titles and the quality of their albums. Here they’ve managed to make the same song 12 times, and, save for a few interesting percussion shifts, it’s not a good song. In their desire to be film directors, artists and guardians of the oral tradition, they’ve neglected the very thing that comes out of the speakers.