Liars
Drum's Not Dead

THE REVIEW

The new release by Liars is already announced right from the start as one of the best of the year, with the three protagonists now definitively having achieved the status of one of the major independent realities of the decade... and yet... yet something doesn't add up: the drums are increasingly the backbone of Liars' poetics... and the charm of the drumming is indisputable, a tribal skeleton with sharper and more martial strokes that never loses sight of its expressive purpose, never over the top and yet so absolutely the protagonist; if only for the rhythms, the album would be a masterpiece... But, on one hand, the album suffers from the same flaw of many independent releases: it lacks epicness, not so much in the strictly musical sense, but in terms of an artistic ambition that doesn't go beyond "the niche album," doesn't seek the masterpiece, it stops at an existential dimension without ever seeking the absolute. On the other hand, it's an album where the references, perhaps hidden but still identifiable, are never surpassed by a truly outstanding personality.

The No Wave and the New York tradition that some say are so transparent in their music actually stop at the dark and subdued atmospheres, which are never particularly enveloping; instead, Liars often have an effect that reminds, dangerously closely, of Radiohead, but light years away from the interpretative eclecticism of the English quintet. The first three tracks of the album, if one wants to be reductive (but not too much), seem to reproduce "there there" three times, while the rest, more radical and electronic, seems to have little awareness of its communicative path. Only the last two pieces, more "mantric," have a harmonic depth that nonetheless doesn't seem to be genuinely carried to completion...

"Drum's Not Dead" is an album that leaves the sensation of not very expressive and not very defined experimentalism, which rarely arrives anywhere that hasn't already been said or that truly fascinates.