Artist:
LIARS
Label:
MUTE RECORDS
Video:
“PLASTER CASTS OF EVERYTHING”
Director:
Patrick Daughters
Add Date:
September 18, 2007

Greetings to all my music loving friends! It’s Andy Gesner and the staff from HIP Video Promo bringing you another fearless clip. There are bands that follow trends, and then there are others who are so far out ahead of the zeitgeist that even the writers have to race to catch up. Through all of their stylistic shifts and challenging moves, Liars have followed their artistic impulses into territory rarely traveled by indie rock bands. They’ve been rewarded with a devoted following, and a critical profile to rival that of any contemporary musical group. Brave and unorthodox methods such as theirs don’t always bring success, but when they do, that’s reason enough to celebrate.

The tributes to the band’s fourth album Liars have already begun – and it hasn’t even been officially released yet. The All-Music Guideassigned Liars four and a half stars; across the Atlantic (where the band has built a substantial audience), the NME called the album “perfect” and praised the band for its “uncompromising, fearless approach”. Raves are nothing new for the three-piece – their edgy 2001 debut They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top is now considered one of the cornerstones of the New York City dance-rock movement. Follow-up They Were Wrong, So We Drowned took a radically different approach; cool and mystical, full of haunting falsetto and dark percussion. Third album Drum’s Not Deadwas called a “total fucking triumph on all levels” by Pitchfork, and appeared on countless Best-Of lists for 2006. The album’s fractured landscape featured the narratives of two embattled characters, soaring melodies, musique concrete, and plenty of near-tribal drumming.
Liars isn’t as conceptually explicit as Drum’s Not Dead or They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. But the sonic and textural experiments of those two respected albums have been placed at the service of a batch of compelling songs – some of which are structured a bit like traditional guitar-rock. “Plaster Casts Of Everything” is, by some standards, the most accessible recording that Liars has ever made. It’s still brittle as a dried bone, and as weird and barbed as David Byrne’s worst nightmare. But Angus Andrews’ powerful vocals are front and center, and the song has a clear chorus and it builds to a thunderous release. If a brave deejay were to play “Plaster Casts Of Everything” on contemporary modern rock radio, it’d make everything else on the playlist seem tame and conservative by comparison – but it wouldn’t sound out of place.

Liars have always believed in the power of music video; the enhanced version of Drum’s Not Dead came bundled with three different filmed interpretations of the entire album. For “Plaster Casts Of Everything”, the trio have collaborated with one of the best in the business – Patrick Daughters, the tough-minded auteur behind the clip for “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. His spot for “Plaster Casts” is a twisted late-night hallucination, and a study in disorientation. A young man drives a car on a black highway; as the vehicle gathers speed and teeters on the brink of control, he looks suitably terrified. Suddenly, there are two of him in the same seat – a shot of another person has been superimposed over him. His “face” moves in two directions at once, and it’s impossible to tell whether he’s laughing or crying. His mouth falls open, and white light pours out of it and through the windshield; he’s turned into a kind of film projector, and a ghostly image of an old woman appears on the road. A passenger appears next to him; “she”, too, is an amalgam of two different people, one comforting and the other terrifying. The car scatters a group, and they run wildly for the shoulders of the road. This is a world of spectral beings, transparent and without substance, drifting through each other and frightening everything they encounter.

Huge thanks to Stephanie Trick, Mark Fotiadis, and the entire Mute crew for all of their hard work to help bring you all of the new videos from their roster. They have set us up with plenty of copies of Liars for all of your on-air giveaway needs, so give us a shout. And don’t forget, the band will be on tour with Interpol throughout the fall, which means that if you’d like to catch up for a quick video interview, we can hook that up as well. If you need more info, call Andy Gesner at 732-613-1779 or e-mail us at info@HIPVideoPromo.com . You can also visit www.Mute.com, or www.LiarsLiarsLiars.com to find out more about Liars.

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