Music
OUTSIDE THE FESTIVALS
‘I ENJOY RELOCATING AND THE RE-EVALUATING THAT COMES WITH IT’ Hitlist THE BEST ROCK, POP, JAZZ & FOLK*
✽✽ Futuristic Retro Champions, Martin Creed Band and Eugene Kelly Sugary, defiantly upbeat pop from FRC who launch their new single, ‘May the Forth’, plus performances from Martin (my other job is a visual artist) Creed and his band, and Mr Kelly from The Vaselines. See Five Reasons, page 119. Mono, Glasgow, Thu 5 Aug. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Kitty, Daisy & Lewis Two sisters and a brother (pictured above), with a shared love of old-timey rock’n’roll, R&B, swing and blues sounds. Their mum and dad (Ingrid used to play drums in The Raincoats) provide backing. See festival preview, page 53. King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, Glasgow, Fri 6 Aug. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ The Wilders Proper hoe-down, rootsy, hillbilly country stuff this, from the Kansas boys. We like the review that said, ‘If this were old Salem, they’d be burned at the stake. They play like they’re possessed.’ Classic Grand, Glasgow, Sat 7 Aug. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Liars See preview, left. Stereo, Glasgow, Mon 9 Aug. (Rock & Pop) ✽✽ Piping Live! Glasgow’s International Piping Festival An extravaganza of bellowing bagpipes and whining chanters – in the annual festival that draws over 30,000 visitors to Glasgow, including pipers from New Zealand, India, America, Canada, Italy . . . and Fife. Various venues, Glasgow, Mon 9–Sun 15 Aug. (Folk) ✽✽ The John Knox Sex Club and Wounded Knee The JKSC are less about Calvinist deviance, and more about gentle art-rock. Wounded Knee, aka Drew Wright, will be playing out more experiments with folk music. Stereo, Glasgow, Thu 12 Aug. (Rock & Pop) 5–12 Aug 2010 THE LIST 115
Home truths
Feelings of alienation and the ‘outsider’ mentality in LA inspired a large part of Liars’ latest album. David Pollock gets the truth out of singer Angus Andrew
T oto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more. But Angus Andrew is. He and his band, Liars, are in the state’s college city of Lawrence, playing the latest tour date, when The List speaks to him. With respect to the people of Lawrence, it’s a pinprick on the map in American terms, but there’s something apt about getting him on the line from such an obscure location. This band is a particularly nomadic one, having recorded five albums over ten years in places including New York, Berlin and a cabin in the woods of New Jersey.
Among other things, their recordings represent Andrew’s own musical psychogeography tour. For new album Sisterworld though, the trio have returned to where it all started, where the Australian Andrew (above, centre) first met Aaron Hemphill and Julian Gross. ‘I guess it’s a concept record,’ he says, ‘which has a lot to do with our experience of living in LA recently. It relates that experience to ideas of alienation, of disclocation, of being in a large city but feeling alone. It’s dark and a bit scary. ‘We’re interested in the giant homeless population and people who are just completely involved in their own thing, for example the porn industry. There are a lot of different types of ‘underground’, particularly in LA, where there’s no real geographical centre; people are forced to create subcultures in order to create a sense of society.’
Although the trio met in LA, Liars’ initial success came while they were based in New York, when 2001’s debut LP They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument On Top briefly saw them
associated with dance-punk bands like The Rapture, Radio 4 and the DFA stable. Then 2004’s minimal concept album about witch trials They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, saw them digress from an even vaguely commercial zone. This instinct for no-wave production values and esoteric high concepts continued into 2006’s Berlin-recorded Drum’s Not Dead and 2007’s Liars, the first album they made in LA, cementing Liars’ reputation as the kind of band that anyone who can survive the first listen will love. ‘Recording in different places is something I like to do for each record,’ says Andrew, ‘mainly on a personal level. I enjoy relocating and the sense of re- evaluating that comes with it, rethinking the place I’ve reached, you know? It brings another perspective on life and the music, that’s one reason I try to do something new on each record.’
Does he find it easy to integrate into new places? ‘I don’t know if I’m integrated at all,’ he laughs. My perspective is pretty much as an outsider wherever I go, except maybe if I was back in Australia, although who knows? Maybe I’ve been gone so long I’d be an outsider there too. I enjoy going to places I don’t really fit in.’ So where else would he like to record? ‘Pretty much anywhere in the Asian subcontinent or South America. The UK, if it looked like getting cheaper anytime soon. I like the thought of Scotland, man, somewhere the countryside is really beautiful. I prefer the country in the UK to the cities.’
S t e re o , G l a s g o w, M o n 9 A u g . T h e a l b u m Sisterworld is out now on Mute.