So, what's the deal with the resurrection of punk? Every few years - like a musical phoenix - a new crop of three-chord, three-minute songsters bust out of their garages. We've had new-fangled poppy punkers Blink 182 and Sum 41, as well as the slightly more sophisticated cocktail-shakers The Hives. And now we have 'arty' punkers - the Liars.
The Liars take their cues from old school punk rock. No, we're not talking about the Sex Pistols, we're talking about the genre's other life at a little club called CBGBs on the Bowery in the dirty heart of Manhattan. The Liars scatter their guitar noodlings with pellets of dirt and glass.
Melbourne's finest - Angus Andrew leads the pack with his yelping vocals and bravado sexuality. He cops more than a few moves from Mick Jagger (all the kids seems to be aping Mick these days) from the set-starting strip tease (revealing a rather fetching woolly sweater resplendent with golden leaves) to his mewling pouty-lipped song belting. The rest of the band just plunge head first into the fray. And what a fray it is. These guys are bonkers. They play like their lives depend on it - each song comprised of equal measures of blood, sweat, tears and joy that someone is actually letting them do this for a living.
Forget trying to distinguish the songs, much less their lyrics. It seems to be one long song, with little tempo breaks between. There is a frisson of electricity in the crowd -everyone hypnotized by them. It is not their music, not even the 'look' - it is them. They have that flame, that added value. They're punk in the sense that they are noise dissenters and their music is art. The sounds are what they get off on - Hey what happens if I put the mic right up to my digital delay? Let's find out! Imagine an AK47 that shoots rounds of sonic ammunition and you're getting kind of close.
By the end of the set, guitarist Aaron Hempell fingers are bleeding and he has sacrificed two strings to the guitar gods. He doesn't care - he pulls off a third string and runs it up and down the neck violin-style to create a rather gorgeous feedback humming. The music is like swimming in a silver bowl of fire-engine red jelly - it breaths with you, surrounds you with malleable flexible sounds that aren't quite melodic, but aren't quite white noise. The entire audience is left gob-smacked and wondering what the hell just happened. The Liars live are the equivalent of a car crash - suddenly blindsided by the completely unexpected… time stands still… outlook changed forever.
