Liars>>>Deerhunter>>>High Places @ Koko 17/06/08

I never realised Angus Andrew was such a doofus. Not terminology I’d normally use, not being a 14 year old Californian princess, but there’s no other word for it. Even at their most accessible - as on their latest, self-titled album - Liars are not an easy listen, and when one delves, as they do regularly tonight, into the murky depths of their Drum’s Not Dead and They Were Wrong, So We Drowned material, the incongruity of such traumatic and occasionally terrifying music being fronted by a pirouetting buffoon in an oversized backwards boating blazer and comedy baggy trousers becomes a little overwhelming. It’s always good when a band doesn’t take themselves too seriously, but there is a line, and dancing around in a little circle pulling funny faces and making jazz hands while the aural equivalent of a nuclear holocaust in Hades is going on around you definitely crosses it.

Try as he might, though, Andrews’s perpetual clowning can’t detract from what is a startlingly impressive Liars performance. Nimbly skipping across a back catalogue that is as stylistically diverse as it is avowedly groundbreaking – they seamlessly switch from propulsive punk funk to primal experimentalism via cyber-noisecore faster than most bands can pull on an oversized backwards boating blazer – Liars specialise in constructing a fearsome sound collage of razor blades and baseball bats: at once scything and thudding, screeching and shuddering. Guitarist Aaron Hemphill is chief suspect here – guitar ratcheted up high, bespectacled like a young Albini, he alternates between wrenching chunks of searing fuzz from his fretboard and leaping behind a booming effects-laden drum kit.

Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack! and a wistfully mournful The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack – both from Drum’s Not Dead, surely their magnum opus – are the predictable highlights, but a resounding Plastercasts of Everything leaves the question of which version of Liars (the harbingers of percussionist hellfire? The dumb snotty punkers? The careering jokers? Err, maybe not) is the definitive open to debate.

Tonight is a joint headline show with Deerhunter, and Bradford Cox’s crew don’t let down their side of the bargain. Cox is a far less simpering frontman than I feared from his ‘ooh, look at my funny poo’ blog, and as he stands, red hoodie covering his stick thin Marfan syndrome arms, relentlessly pulling out a single chord as the band reach Octet’s eschatological climax, he looks nothing less than domineering. The volume regularly verges on the unbearable, their live sound far closer to the white noise of mid-90s Spiritualized or My Bloody Valentine than the bubbling undercurrents of their records. Forthcoming single Nothing Ever Happened is displayed in all its neo-Neu glory, Wash Off threatens to grind the crowd to dust with its scatter gun shots of tremolo and the only real disappointment is the odd lack of Little Kids, the stand alone highlight of new album Microcastle, if not their entire career to date.

A quick mention must be made of bottom-of-the-billers High Places, who consist of a boy thwacking what looks like a xylophone from a Patrick Moore wet dream, in that it seems to have the capacity to make any sound from earth or beyond (particularly favouring resonating tribal pounding and twinkling toy boxes), and a girl looping chants of half-remembered nursery rhymes into a melange of winsome melody and psychedelic squall. It’s pretty great, and deserves a far greater audience than the handful of early arrivals who were lucky enough to witness it.

Gig of the year then? So far, perhaps. Maybe if the crowd weren't so predictably jaded that they seemed to swallow all of the bands' energy as soon as it was powered out of the speakers. Let’s wait until My Bloody Valentine on Monday first…

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