Send "Liars " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Whatever or wherever Sisterworld is, it sounds like a pretty creepy place. The fifth Liars album is relentlessly tense-- not so much scary as surreal. Every track is shrouded in echo and anxiety, and often all the tension erupts into bursts of buzzing guitars or pounding beats. Not every dark cloud breaks into a thunderstorm, but it constantly feels like one is lurking around the corner.Despite such potential for surprise, overall Sisterworld isn't actually all that surprising compared to the rest of Liars' discography. For a band known for switching gears from track to track and album to album, this is the most thoroughly Liars-sounding record so far. It has the rhythmic insistence of Drum's Not Dead, the sleepwalking chants of They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, and the straightforward songwriting of Liars, often sounding like a streamlined update on the latter. The narrowed range brings increased depth, and it's intriguing to hear Liars focus on detail and texture rather than stylistic schizophrenia. It turns out refinement suits them as nicely as reinvention....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| In the ten-or-so years since Liars’ inception, the band has weathered a relentless rollercoaster of the best and worst of what the current music-critical tumult has to offer. That they’ve persisted this long at all, burdened with both lofty accolades and bitter backlash, is nothing short of a minor miracle. Retracing the ups and downs of the trio’s career arc is likely old hat by now, but in brief, the band has upended the expectations of their audience on enough occasions that they’ve garnered something of a reputation for independence. That reputation has certainly been hard-earned, but it might be that their interest in making “honest,” externally unobligated music — realized through an unwavering dedication to their own collective vision — is precisely what’s enabled them to bear the sort of weight that might have crushed a less willful outfit. What’s more, they’ve delivered four unusually thoughtful, well-crafted-yet-rough-hewn records during their time together. Now, in March of 2010, Liars have landed this side of the last decade on solid ground, with their fifth album in hand. It’s called Sisterworld and simply put: it’s a gut-lacerating doozy of a recording. In terms of process, Sisterworld is a sort of return to form for Liars. For their last, eponymous LP, the trio chose to upset the working method with which they’d become comfortable, adopting a drastically accelerated production timeline and attempting to “forego” the unifying conceptual designs they’d developed for their second and third outings. Their intention was to produce an album that emphasized individual songs over LP-length narrative and atmospheric statements, one that could really “connect” and “communicate” with listeners in a more immediate, visceral way. For Sisterworld, however, the band revisits the slower, more thematically definite working process of Drum’s Not Dead and They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. This time around, there’s a clear conceptual and musical cohesion among the record’s eleven tracks — instrumental and timbral touchstones appear and reappear on multiple songs, melodic and lyrical themes can be traced through the record — but it’s also clear that their hand-tying explorations have left a valuable impression as well. Sisterworld is Liars’ most accessible record to date — the production is clear and precise, the songs are often economically structured and just plain catchy — and the band has managed a methodological synthesis, achieving conceptual coherence while also assembling a collection of tracks that could all burn just as brilliantly when removed from the context of the album as a whole....full text |
| Thedecibeltolls |
| A quick and barely coherent review, as I’m groggy from holiday travels and a bit buzzed from holiday libations. But seeing as Sisterworld leaked almost 24 hours ago, we had to get this review up a.s.a.p. Hopefully Web Sheriff won’t shut down down like he/she did last year at this time for the Merriweather leak. So, moving forward… I’m not sure if Liars often find themselves in the same conversation as some of the most revered names in contemporary music. Probably not (though they don’t need the overhyping). Their trajectory runs quite parallel to, say, Radiohead and Wilco. Liars, like the aforementioned, began their journey as something accessible, and over the years, acutely turned into something more unique and significant. At the height of the dance punk craze, Liars’ released their boring debut They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. It was loved and fans were engaged. Then, the band got very interesting and released They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. It was a Lou Reed moment – the album was strange and bore no resemblance to their previous jam hive. I loved Drowned personally, but it was generally disliked. Liars honed in their experimental sensibilities in a more focused and acclaimed work through Drum’s Not Dead, then followed up with their more straightforward eponymous record one year later. Many distinct movements, all without jumping the shark. Sound familiar?...full text |
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