KaitO

Angus Andrew’s trousers are around his ankles.

The Liars singer – gangly and continually jerking, often with the faint menace of a Harryhausen stop-motion mythical assailant – grabs at his microphone, fingers clawed, guitar slung behind his skinny back like a bloody axe. He squawks something about nothing – “The Devil’s in our eyes!” – and sinks the rest of whatever’s in the plastic cup to his right. As he rattles and rolls, his clothes, loose about his frame, work their way from flesh to floor: jacket, waistcoat, American pants. He’s the wedding reception drunk, given free reign to remonstrate, absurdly so, however he sees fit, all before a crowd willing to pay to see such indulgence; what’s more, they’re loving it. Bodies before our on-stage focal point twitch with reckless abandonment; plastic receptacles fly skywards and drop stagewards, their liquid contents splashing onto twin drum kits and faces roughed by the circus of touring album number three, the far-from-instantaneous Drum’s Not Dead.

The impact of its live rendering, though, is bamboozling, the senses disorientated and unsure whether the correct reaction is to fight or flee or fuck senseless to what’s unfolding some yards before eyes always distracted by the Jesus pose-pulling Andrew, lead in his teeth and hair in his eyes. Though the singer – Australian inflections by way of New York City translating British council estate slang into a wholly alien dialect – is the recipient of our wandering gaze from precedent-setting bombastic start to frenetic cover-version finish, Liars’ most potent force of unnatural persuasion is their powerhouse percussion from another planet. Julian Gross, resplendently cock-rockin’ in full-body leotard with under-garment sparkles where his chest hair should be, is a drummer to end all drummers: four minutes in his company is aurally akin to having Phil Collins duet with the spirit of John Bonham with (insert predictable drummer of choice here) taking notes for a full 24 hours. With your ear against the bass drum. A bass drum the size of Snowdon. Snowdon, if it were in the Himalayan chain. Aaron Hemphill, though guitarist by the Music Magazine Trade Descriptions Act, passes much of his time slamming splintering sticks into another kit. The combination – Hemphill clicking wood on wood and pounding skins with the enthusiasm of a five-year-old enjoying their debut Hungry Hippos session, Gross conjuring express train drones from the assortment of bludgeon-ready objects before him – is utterly, mind-fuckingly, extinction-level-event explosive.

A tiny bead of dribble escapes my lips and runs down my chin.

Andrew prances like a bird of paradise, prowls like an on-the-hunt dinosaur, climbs like a malnourished sloth; he’s the star, visually, but his bandmates are Liars’ spine, their structural support and essential stability. That said, there’s precisely nothing stable about a performance such as this: all notions of playing safe are off come curtain up, and the trio leave no few faces puzzled, their owners departing early into the bitter cold. It’s the smallminded’s loss: this is music that fills the heart like a deep-pan meat feast does the stomach, all manner of gooey goodness swimming about your insides and making you feel just a shade queasy. Come the concluding destruction of ‘Territorial Pissings’, a not entirely necessary but undoubtedly enjoyable epilogue, all that have let Liars take them to some other place for the past hour-and-some are delirious. There are no expressions across their faces that imply they missed a trick, or that they’ve adopted the opinion of a parent: tuneless rubbish.

Tuneless, sometimes, but rubbish, never: Liars have upped the live-act ante, turning the rock and roll show into a performance art piece that’s neither fist-pumpingly adrenaline-soaked nor sit-down-and-shut-up introspective. It is what you want it to be, they are whatever you make them into.

I want to make Andrew pull his trousers up.

Photograph courtesy of Amadeep