A night of notable three-piece bands hits the stage at Big Night Live in Boston: the set poised between Providence locals BabyBaby_Explores and legendary Chinese post-punks Re-TROS is one of the scant few dates that constitutes the all-too-brief North American return of Australian act Liars. Their most recent release is 2021’s The Apple Drop, and its three initials adorn the back of frontman Angus Andrew’s bright green jumpsuit.
Andrew has always been fond of a costume theme for each album cycle, and the jumpsuit is on the more conservative side of things: TFCF saw him don a wedding dress and veil onstage, and the Mess era featured colorful masks. Their music has shapeshifted even more times, starting heavy on guitar and moving to embrace synths further with Mess as the zenith of that trend. Since then, they’ve blended these components in different measures, with Andrew eventually becoming the sole permanent member of Liars; the project’s history allows him the freedom and leeway to fully explore in any direction. Songs like ‘Sekwar’ possess undeniable pop sensibility in his braggadocious vocals, and ‘Big Appetite’ reminds one why the act once toured with Radiohead, with its steadfast but not forceful guitar progressions and airy vocals panning around in quieter moments.
Andrew is tall, long arms moving in circles and other gesticulations in between adjustments to a modest synth setup in front of him – it gives the impression that he’s setting the song up with the knobs and buttons, then proceeding to stir the sounds around in the air with a kind of mysticism. He’s joined by the duo of drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell, making up this incarnation of the band. Fittingly enough, ‘The Start’ begins a set that focuses primarily on The Apple Drop, with exactly one selection from each of Liars’ previous releases. ‘Coins in My Caged Fist’ brings its jangly weirdness to the set, and ‘Scissor’ calls back to the band’s landmark Sisterworld, an unlikely narrative of a desperate moment morphed into something else; Andrew’s hand extending above the anticipatory crowd as his index and middle fingers twist to form the titular shape. This song’s imagery finds a connection much later on in The Apple Drop’s ‘My Pulse to Ponder’, which appears midway through the set.
The fervor of ‘Mess on a Mission’ proves a watershed moment at which the audience really starts to cut loose – they get everyone to keep moving and clapping for the following song ‘No. 1 Against the Rush’. The album from which the latter hails, WIXIW, remains a pivotal moment in the Liars discography when the genesis of their modern synth influence truly took hold. Nonetheless, the set ends with one final diversion, this time to the band’s self-titled 2007 album with ‘Plaster Casts of Everything’. Compositionally, it’s one of the band’s simpler songs, and yet simultaneously one of their most engaging, its rawness emphasized by the apparent guilelessness of its lyrics – “I wanna run away / I wanna bring you too”. Andrew, for this final push, takes his fluorescent orange mic cord in his mouth, whipping the business end around in the air with the kind of fervor that some bands often lose this many years in. But the chameleonic appeal of Liars outlasts all, threatening to shift at any moment into another creative, perpetually mutable outlet for the expression of whatever strange themes and sounds may come to mind.
Photos and Review by Collin Heroux
