Record Review - Liars: Sisterworld

Mute

Nobody does nightmares like Angus Andrews. The imposing Liars frontman has dealt in creepy, hallucinatory imagery since the band’s beginning. On Sisterworld, Andrews has streamlined his lyricism into one long spookfest: Nearly every song on the album is a surrealist’s wet (bad) dream. Sisterworld is an amalgam of Liars’ ever-changing sound. The twisted atmospherics of They Were Wrong, So We Drowned and the guitar-fueled rawk of 2007’s self-titled effort appear here, as does some of the anthemic post-punk that fueled the band’s debut. For this reason, Sisterworld seems a tad scattershot. In the wake of Drum’s Not Dead, Liars’ 2006 career-defining opus, the band continues to struggle with its place in the musical environment; ironic, given that many bands dominating said environs were born partly out of Liars’ own work. Sisterworld contains its share of great moments (check out the horror film strings in the excellent “Here Comes All the People”), but isn’t quite a great record. 3 out of 5 stars.