::Liars - They Were Wrong So We Drowned::

“Fear is a very powerful emotion.” Or so says the first sentence of Liars’ press release.

I’d tend to agree. After all, we’re fed fear every day. Glance at Fox “News” and most of the time you’ll get some sort of mention of an orange/purple/green alert. Why? To scare us into watching more? To see what kind of duct tape we should purchase? To see when Bill O’Reilly predicts the world is going to melt?

Although the media does play a large part in the American consciousness, it’s not completely their fault that we are terrified of everything. I’d like to point my long middle finger at the Bush administration for the rest of the blame. Sure, everyone should have felt uneasy and, well, terrified after 9/11, but the extent that the Bush administration went to was ridiculous. What they have taught us, by example, in the past few years is absurd: every middle-eastern non-U.S.-supporter is a potential terrorist whether they prove to be an imminent threat or not. What the hell happened to innocent until proven guilty?

Liars, like many other skeptical Americans have watched what has happened to our country for the past few years with a weary, firsthand eye. They are from Brooklyn, minutes away from where this all began (or did it?). Rather than take the blatantly easy route by screaming personal politics over sharp-edged discopunk, (see They Threw Us in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top) Liars have created something different.

Liars have taken America’s history of fear and turned it into an uncompromising work of art. They have proved that our earliest fears run parallel to our current paranoia. That’s right; Liars have created a concept album about witches.
The United States has a history of witch hunts. They date as far back as the literal Salem witch trials to the McCarthy “you’re a communist” era all the way up to now, and the Bush “you’re not patriotic” era. These times have created a paranoia uniquely American, one that is dutifully captured on Liars’ They Were Wrong So We Drowned.

The album in question is one that takes sound and uses it to create the aural equivalent of a Pollack painting. Synth bleeps, collapsible drums, and lacerating guitars arise chaotically and sporadically creating dark and forceful sound collages reminiscent of terrified confusion and dread.

Although Liars have allowed their sound to become noisier and less-accessible, their old post-punk resonance is not completely gone. Songs like, “There’s Always Room on the Broom” and “Hold and It Will Happen Anyway” revisit familiar territory that is both recognizably welcome respites and forward-thinking at once.

They Were Wrong, So We Drowned is not for everyone. This is a record interested in social commentary through art, and difficult art at that. This record will polarize many crowds like most abstract contemporary art does. But if you allow yourself to get into it, you will find, as the Liars’ press release says, “Fear is a very seductive emotion.”