When we talked to Angus Andrews, Liars’ Aussie-accented, Frankenstein-frontman, January snow was blowing in the window and we were still playing with the Game Boy Color we got for Christmas. We talked about Sonic Youth, we talked about porn, we talked about Sonic Youth porn, and we talked about Sisterworld, the band’s reliably twisted recent album that 7 months later is as terrifying as ever. With the Sisterworld tour finally hitting our now snowless doorsteps, we thought we’d finally go ahead and let you eavesdrop.
Even though we should talk about your new album, we really, really should talk about your new remix album first. That documentary Kill Yr Idols that came out in 2004 was really condescending about your band, and your place in the New York canon – and now you’re being remixed by Suicide.
I actually never fully saw that documentary, but I remember being aware that a lot of this older guard from New York would be weirded out by the new stuff coming out. I mean, I do the same thing now with new bands coming out of New York.
You hate them.
Yeah. Heh heh, no, I just don’t understand it. It’s the same for most people I think, once you come back to a place and there’s a whole new movement of art, it’s difficult to connect with.
I am totally crowbarring this in. SPEAKING OF KILL YR IDOLS, I recently discovered that there’s series of porn movies set to Sonic Youth movies. Would Liars make good porn soundtracks?
Yeah! Why not. That’s another genre that could use some refreshing, why not us? You did see that porno cover we did for some single a while back [It Fit When I Was A Kid], right? You can see we don’t have any problems getting into the… nitty gritty.
So did you decide what was going to be behind the tiny little door on the Sisterworld album cover before you put it out?
It was pretty simultaneous actually. After we made the record, we took a break from the music and took a trip up to Big Sur, and left everything behind to put ourselves out in this environment we were imagining while making the record. It was a good way to get a more tactile feeling of what the album was about. That was when we discovered what should be on the other side of the door – we knew that we wanted to do some fairly interesting packaging – what had to come on the other side had to resonate.
If environment is a key factor in your records, and this one was made in L.A., what’s reflected about it in the album?
L.A. is such a fascinating city. It’s a frightening experiment gone wrong. There are a lot of ideas we’ve dealt with on records before, like isolation, alienation, identification, vanity, that when we came to make a record in L.A., all those ideas seemed to lay over the landscape perfectly. It’s a place considered as this paradise with palm trees, but the reality is much more frightening – it’s interesting to open your eyes in L.A. as opposed to sitting in your car on the freeway. How do people function here when… when it’s so hard to even put your finger on what the place is. It’s like Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth guitarist) says in that song, [adopts Lee Ranaldo baritone] ‘L.A. IS SO CONFUSING NOW’. The people who get it are the people who just allow it to be undefinable.
It must definitely be frightening, I’ve had nightmares that could be soundtracked by the new album.
We should totally make a nightmare porno.
You’re in the right place too – you could just go down to the Valley, it’s perfect.
That’s what most people do. L.A. has the largest pool of rejected people. They come here to try and make it, don’t, so what do you do? They end up going to the Valley and making porn. The other weird things people do are just as interesting.
Instrumentally, the album’s a lot wider than before – how are you working the brass and piano and stuff into the live band of three or four of you?
It’s tricky, it’s a question of maybe understanding the live arena as a different medium, and it’s possible to rethink how the songs function entirely. It’s not as if we’re so well-known for… perfectly replicating albums live.
The last time I saw you was Primavera 2009…
That’s interesting, that was around when we were making the album and it was a nightmare trying to give justice to it with three people. We’re going to have to take more people onboard.
What’s the worst thing Liars has ever done?
Starting off this trend of talking very conceptually about everything we do. Even if we made something entirely devoid of meaning, that would have to be a meaning within itself at this stage. It’s something that’s always on our minds. It’s a really fine line when you’re talking about your work – do you just keep things pretty simple so people don’t get caught in your madness?
More than three members of Liars play Whelan’s on the 11th of August, tickets at €15. www.tickets.ie/umack
Words: Daniel Gray
