CD reviews: Liars – Sisterworld

Sisterworld is this year’s clear frontrunner for Most Unsettling Album. New York punk creeps Liars have outdone even themselves in crafting a disconcerting, fascinating album, one that thoroughly deserves the deluxe vinyl treatment given it by Mute.

Opener and first single ‘Scissor’ is an amazingly abrupt, alternating mournful winding ballad with a coda of fearful thrashing guitar (incidentally, if you haven’t seen the incredible video for this track, get thee to a YouTube).

Liars have assembled their most complex orchestrations for Sisterworld, with pieces like ‘Here Comes All The People’ pairing a ringing punk slow-burn recorded in LA with theatrical string atmospherics recorded in Prague a year later.

After three minutes of pulsing bass feedback and a spare march in ‘Drip’, a concert piano leaks into the mix as though from another room. The effect is unnerving and beautiful.

Just when you think you’re ready to spend some time crying in the shower, ‘Proud Evolution’ melds shuffling rhythms into something danceable and very nearly fun.

Such is Liars’ skill – within an instant they lurch between caustic and slinky; nasty choral aggression ‘No Barrier Fun’ to breezy Cali-punk in ‘The Overachievers’. Despite the radical shifts in tone, sometimes in the span of a single track, Sisterworld is all one place, carefully constructed and realised.
Sisterworld isn’t a particularly bright album, and occasionally details can become lost in the fray, though perhaps that’s exactly how it should be.

Mute has been generous with its vinyl edition, including two comfortingly fat LPs, one including Sisterworld and another Sisterworld Reinterpretations, with remixes from kindred weirdos Thom Yorke, Alan Vega, Devendra Banhart and the Melvins. Along with the wax are CD versions of each album and handsome liner art. TG

Sound: 3 1/2

Music: 4