I've always thought of the Bottleneck in layout and atmosphere as a more spacious CBGB, rest its hole in wall soul, even down to the delightfully musty odor (which was enhanced that night due to nature's Dutch oven). Fitting, then, that a band who made a name for themselves in the New York post-punk scene alongside Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would be playing in Lawrence's own OMFUG.
The crowd at the Bottleneck was a mix of youngins and not-so-youngins, hip and not-so-hip. This is reflective of the similarly varied sound of Liars themselves, appealing to many different tastes with their sonic smorgasbord. Before we could get to the entrée section of the buffet, however, we had to dispense with the appetizer. And what a strange pile of ambient artichoke dip it was. (Okay, I'll stop with the extended food metaphor.)
Original openers Fol Chen had to cancel for whatever silly reason, leaving warm-up duties to artist and composer John Weise. Weise took to the stage in darkness, sat behind a tiny table of knobs and doodads, then proceeded to make people crap themselves. He played one, continuous twenty minute "song" that sounded like a throbbing embolism. When I asked one of the organizers beforehand what Weise sounded like, they replied simply, "A nightmare." Fair enough. I've never iDosed, but I imagine it's pretty similar to Weise's aural skull-schtupping. It was a symphony of digital distortion that sounded like the inside of John Carpenter's wet dreams. While that may not sound very appealing on paper, a group of about fifty people stood rapt in attention. Just goes to show there's an audience for everything.
Then, Liars. Vocalist and guitarist Angus Andrew came out looking like a younger, skeezier Nick Cave. (That's a compliment.) He wore a black t-shirt while his band mates wore white in a good cop vs. bad cop scenario. It was a dynamic that allowed Andrew to twitch and shimmy while Aaron Hemphill and Julian Gross stoically kept things moving. Setting the tone for the rest of the set, they kicked things off with the percussive grind of "There's Always Room on the Broom" (the video for which was directed by Ssion's Cody Critcheloe -- so there you go, a shoe-horned local reference).
Eschewing their more experimental stuff for the danceable noise-funk cuts in their catalog, Liars pounded out a tightly wound and propulsive show. Just when you thought they might lapse into ballad territory, they got all spastic on your soon-to-be shimmying ass. The crowd was always kept on their toes. If the rhythm section wasn't cut down at the knees by sudden bursts of electronic squealing, then hypnotic synthesizer loops were strafed with blitzkrieg guitars, as was the case with new track "Scissor." One of the few grace notes came during the last third of the show in the form of a straight ahead cover of Bauhaus' "In the Flat Field."
By the time the pure punk finale of "Plaster Casts of Everything" was unloaded on the audience, Andrew and his cohorts were perspiring a small tsunami. The crowd at the Bottleneck, in solidarity, met them drop for drop.
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