Concert Review

New York City art-punk trio The Liars brought a rollicking and abrasive hour of new material to TT the Bear’s Place on November 30. Showcasing their soon-to-be released sophomore LP, They Were Wrong So We Drowned, the Liars descended deeper into experimental rock without fully leaving behind the Gang of Four aesthetic that won them such cred with their debut, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Put a Monument on Top.

Simply put, there’s nothing on the new album that you’re going to hear in the background of MTV’s Rich Girls, like the hook from 2000’s, “Mr. Your On Fire Mr.,” off the debut, which recently made this television appearance. That exercise in poor syntax was recently covered by the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s, another band in the growing crowd of NYC art-punks, whose flamboyant lead singer Karen O dates the flamboyant lead singer of The Liars, Angus Andrew—perhaps the Gwen and Gavin for a hipper generation? The Liars have a relentless experimentation that is their claim to uniqueness in this current crop, and in the material they debuted to Boston at TT’s, they demonstrated that they have not yet begun to enact their breakdown on conventional structures of rock and dance music.

The crowd that Sunday night at TT’s grew with each successive opening band—The Young People and Tunnel of Love served up two uninteresting rounds of raucous rock—with a noticeable influx around 10:30, 15 minutes before the Liars were supposed to come on. The small space in front of the stage gradually became more and more crammed with well-coiffed heads, as the sets changed and the Liars’ instruments were “tuned,” and all were thrilled with not knowing what to expect. Would the band be playing old material, rousing the audience into frenzied dancing, or would they be debuting new songs of a different vein?

The trio emerged one-by-one, first drummer Julian Gross and then multi-instrumentalist Aaron Hemphill. Then there was a moment of expectation for the third member of the trio, until the audience noticed a hulking figure lurking in shadows along the wall stage right, poised to burst on stage—the six-and-a-half feet of Angus Andrew, dwarfing the microphone he grunted into, incomprehensibly Australian in voice, playfully clad in a tight black shirt with a gold sequined tiger pawing over his shoulders.

Within seconds it was apparent that the band was going in a different direction from They Threw Us All in a Trench. They opened with the sprawling lead track from They Were So Wrong, “Broken Witch,” exchanging guitar from Hemphill with drum fills, as Andrew croaked a sullen chant: “I, I am the boy; she, she is the girl; he, he is the bear. We, we, we…”—a seeming parody of simple rock lyrics that perfectly parallels the song’s and the band’s breakdown and critique of traditional rock forms. None of these songs had a trace of simple verse-chorus-verse structure; blips of musical phrasing come and go in irregular patterns, emphatically and perhaps even poignantly.

Whereas earlier Liars releases have been vitriolic and explosive, the new material draws its power from a meditative drone. The Liars know well the power of a repeated phrase, and Andrew’s mantra on “We Fenced Other Houses with the Bones of Our Own” of “take your cauldron and get down” over Hemphill’s harmonizing vocals and bass-low guitar line, legitimizes this culled from the absurd witch imagery pervading the new album. In the song, real meaning comes out of nonsense, simply from the power of the sound. In that regard, the new material reflects maturity alongside continued experimentation; the Liars are looking to do more than just get people to dance along.

At times this power overtakes Andrew. During one song he wandered into the audience, parading as the crowd made way for his motion, constricted on TT’s small stage. His stage presence is dynamic and imposing, as he moves and bends himself to the whim of his music, and chats with the crowd in his thick accent. The other members of the band seem content to let Andrew be the focus of the group and, despite drummer Gross’ outlandish costume, they avoid the live show’s spotlight.

There were a few weak numbers, particularly a two-drum, no-guitar number that hasn’t appeared on any Liars release. This song’s primitivism failed to catch the audience’s attention and was perhaps too experimental to appear in a raw form without a fully fleshed-out album version that concert-goers could recognize. The balance between the meditative drones and boisterous freak-outs was skewed, with slower songs at the beginning that only gradually picked up at the end.

But none of this detracted from the mind-blowing show on a whole. The decision not to play older material has been a strong stance for the band to take, but they managed to sell the new album before it even hits the stores, a release slated for next February on Mute Records. As those who have heard it debut on the road know, there will be no sophomore slump for the Liars, and their concerts are among the most engaging and raucous in the rock underground today. The Boston show last week was no exception.