Album Review: Liars - WIXIW

One of the greatest and most innovative bands of the last decade, Liars are never content to rest on their laurels – releasing five incredible albums since 2001, each a mutant evolution of the last. In fact the trio have fearlessly blazed their own purposefully indefinable trail in complete contrast to many of their contemporaries that swaggered out of their New York digs and onto the world stage. Their square-peg-in-a-round-hole approach to music has meant they continually defy expectations and divide audiences, although their beautifully cryptic 2010 album Sisterworld saw them garner more critical acclaim than ever before.

In keeping with their aural curveballs, Liars deliver WIXIW (pronounced “wish you”), a meditation on how things become shrouded and difficult to interpret when taken out of their intended context – hence the strange spelling of the album title. WIXIW then offers ten songs that continually shift and slither in the darkness, impossible to pin down yet inexorably designed to linger long after they take their leave. Single No 1 Against The Rush (a telling title if ever there was one) is an immediate highlight, an incredible track deceptively full of sensual menace. These songs are largely electronic in design, offering the framework for incredibly measured, mood-sculpted compositions laying down dread and anxiety in liberal doses.

There's no pressure valve track here designed to startle the listener with a cathartic release of energetic aggression – everything is tempered and densely textured. From Octagon squeezing every ounce of malevolence from its pores to Annual Moon Words' frantic yet unsettlingly abrupt end to the album, WIXIW is as seductively unnerving a listen as anything of Liars' oeuvre – and just as devastatingly brilliant.