Live Review: The Liars Suffered For Their Art, Now It’s Our Turn
For most bands, “desecrating the very idea of music” would be a putdown. But for the Liars, i’s a job description. On a stormy Saturday night at Warsaw, the Berlin-via-Brooklyn trio played their soul-crushing, ear-puncturing, brain-slashing breed of psycho goth noise punk for several hundred of New York’s vampiest vampires. As usual for a Liars show, much of the crowd fled in mortal terror during the first song, but also as usual, everybody who stayed had a filthy good time and danced and drank and went deaf and grew fangs and killed their parents.
Angus Andrew reputedly stands about six-six, but you just know he’s really six-six-point-six. He prowled and screamed in a blue checkered kilt, cranked up to wolverine-at-nads volume. With his scraggly hair and beard, he looked like Nick Cave after getting humped by Oliver Reed in Curse of the Werewolf, as the band pummelled songs from their excellent new epic, Drum’s Not Dead. “We used to live in Brooklyn — good times,” Angus told the crowd. “There’s one word for life in New York.” The word turned out to be “œeeeeaaaarrrrggggghhhh!” For the finale, the Liars brutalized what was left of our will to live with “Broken Witch” and then busted out (and by “busted out,” I mean “clubbed to death with a baseball bat”) Nirvana’s “Territorial Pissings,” maybe the only song all night with a melody. Awesome!
Etiquette note: Some guy answered his phone in the middle of crowd-surfing. Dude! Live in the now! They’ll call back!
Fashion note: Rock girls are still wearing gym shorts with cowboy boots. Greeeat!
Celeb note: Jessica Alba did not attend, nor did Lindsay Lohan, Kate Moss, Bai Ling, or any other celeb that an unscrupulous Liars fan might randomly mention to give this review more Google hits. But if Jessica Alba attended, she probably would have gone home with a brand new vampire boyfriend.