Liars
WIXIW

LA RECENSIONE

On Saturday, I attended a wedding... I caught a severe intestinal infection and since then I've been getting by with stomach cramps, vomiting, and high fever that causes me to have hallucinatory visions at night. During the day, whether it's due to the sleepless nights that muddle my brain or the strong antibiotics I have to take which blur my vision, I live in a comatose state where nothing is as it seems, and everything appears surrounded by a cottony haze.

The only time I manage to grasp earthly reality is while listening to WIXIW by Liars. It's the closest thing to the situation I'm experiencing, and thus it keeps me grounded, reminding me that listening to an album is a normal action, a simple gesture in everyday life.

And yet, it's still an album by the Liars, there's all their aggressiveness, roughness, and acidity, but it's as if they are within this padded sphere, which somehow manages to show them in a more delicate and dreamy light, at times anxiety-inducing. Just like in the video for the first single No. 1 Against the Rush, where Angus himself is entrapped by a madman with multiple layers of clear film!

A single with the most modern sounds out there. Certainly influenced by the electro-mood that has pervaded all the albums released in the past three years, yet managing not to be overwhelmed by it. The electronic samples used are highly sophisticated, despite their harsh and dirty essence, a trademark of the New York band.

The album opens and closes with the two flattest and mildest songs (“from here we start and here we want to arrive!”) but it's an apparent calm. Octagon seems straight out of Thom Yorke's "The Eraser", Flood to Flood takes us back to underground echoes and El Guapo (very similar to their "Glass House", from Fake French, 2003). In His and Mine Sensations, you can almost see the "attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion" as Roy Batty said (Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982), Brats could very well be blasted at full volume at a rave party.

The title WIXIW is a palindrome, a clear reference to the circular nature of the story, where events repeat with regularity, where the end coincides with a new beginning, where life and death chase each other in a perpetual motion.

Thus, I too proceed to repeat myself, endlessly... from bed to the bathroom and then back to bed...

P.s. Perhaps the Liars have finally managed to find their path, they've assessed the situation and are starting anew from here, who knows... to break free from the "cult band" label or to remain there?