Afro Cubism

Music is the universal language. It is incredible that every person who hears something is affected differently by it, and every person who learns to play a tune will play that tune differently. Some might call it style, and others might just call it personal expression.

Either way, the beauty of music is that is requires no real learning curve- you don't have to speak Portuguese to understand why a bossa nova song is great, and you don't really need to understand music theory to know that Beethoven was on to something special.

There might be exceptions, of course. (Free jazz certainly comes to mind.) Being a musician surrounded by other musicians in a community can often be difficult, because it's easy to loose sight of the fact that a vast majority of the listening (and buying) public are not musicians. They don't give a fuck how a song is made, just that they enjoy listening to it. Understanding the technique may further the appreciation, but there's one thing that cannot be taught in any school: soul. All the greatest have it, and when you see it you just know.

The Buena Vista Social Club was a Cuban music club that thrived as one of Havana's hottest places to dance to great music in the 1940s. The place served as a hotbed of great musicians, who played son music, a mixture of traditional Cuban music with pop and jazz, together for the masses of Cuban clubbers. (Back when clubs were filled with swave dudes and suits and gorgeous women, not skanks and club rats). The club was shut down shortly after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when the Communist government made it difficult for anyone to put on a show with good music. Fuck the man.

In the mid 1990's, however, producer Nick Gold invited guitarist Ry Cooder to a session where members of the old Cuban legend to collaborate with African high-life musicians. Everyone showed up but the Africans, who couldn't get their vistas approved to come. Since the studio was already booked, the remaining cast decided to record some son music. Made in just six days, The Buena Vista Social Club was never supposed to happen the way it did. But after its creation, the record was an international smash that won both five million copies in sales and a Grammy.

More then a decade later, the original project has been resurrected. Just check out the video for the rest. Awesome.

Sam Walker and 'Sisterworld' from Liars

Please help me in welcoming friend-of-show, writer-extrodinare, and alleged apprentice

meth cook Sam Walker to the Joyful Noise team. He's going to be showing up everything else that has even been posted on here, and raising the bar for the entire blogosphere at large. So watch out, interwebs. This shit is gonna blow minds.....

Liars have a curious muse. This is the creative spirit that encouraged them to ditch their debut album’s relatively accessible (and timely) snotty dance punk for a follow-up concept album about old American witch trials, presented in harsh textures and noise cascades, with nary a melody in sight (to be fair, the artsy lady also possessed them to conclude said previous dance album with a half-hour long track). Surely, wrapping up a sophomore project of such complexity and difficulty would persuade Liars to take a small break in the warm waters of the conventional? Hell no. The boys sped headfirst into another concept album dominated by tribal drums, complex rhythms, and furious chanting (2006’s masterpiece, Drum’s Not Dead). The point being: Liars are gonna keep listening to whatever it is that’s giving them these fucked-up, wonderful ideas, and they really don’t give a shit if you like it or not.

Their latest album, Sisterworld, finds the band in full and familiar not-giving-a-shit mode, muse firmly on their shoulder, as they once again deliver on their unspoken promise to be modern art-rock’s most unpredictable act. Sisterworld is looser, conceptually, than some of its siblings, but it retains the full force of Liars’ favorite ideas: the textural tinkering, the intertwining sounds and feedback, the electronic mindgames, the searing, punched-up guitars, and, like the cherry on top of this freaky, freaky sundae, frontman Angus Andrew’s haunting vocals, shifting from a catatonic mumble to a falsetto to a deep drone, sometimes even within the same song. That’s not to say it isn’t naturally a shift from their previous works. It’s obvious that Sisterworld is looser and spacier than anything they’ve done before; it creates its own breathing room and then uses it to its full advantage, even as the tracks remain sparse.

“I dragged her body to the parking lot/I tried to find her a savior right there amongst the cars.”

Analyzing a Liars album by the individual tracks is largely pointless. Sisterworld is a mood piece, like most of their works. It develops in full and tells an abstract story bit by bit and noise by noise.

Still, there are some highlights worth mentioning. First single “Scissor”, and I use the term ‘single’ dubiously in the context of a Liars album, pokes its head slowly out of its hole, with quiet violin and piano and high background voices, then cracks the whip in a major way, as Julian Gross wallops his drums and the guitars come crashing in from nowhere, and just as the listener adjusts for this shift in speed, “Scissor” slows it back down, snapping all our necks on the way. Just for good measure, there’s another, similar breakdown at the end of the song. As Pitchfork aptly put it, this is pure “whiplash rock.”

“Liars skulk in the dark on the delightfully spooky “Drip”, a slow creep that segues into “Scarecrows on a Killer Slant.” The latter features a relentless metallic crunch and a snarling vocal performance over static-y synth, creating something both grating and fascinating.

“Why’d you pass the bum on the street/’cuz he bothered you!”

“Proud Evolution” is the obvious album centerpiece and, despite what I said before about assessing individual Liars songs, stands with the finest tracks the band has ever produced. It creates an entire, beautiful world out of its parts, starting slow and then sprinting forward as the track’s title gets repeated in the background and the epic, dreamy soundscape totally devours your brain. It’s both intricately rewarding and immediately likable. Between it and “The Overachievers”, a surprisingly straightforward (in a good way) punk cut, Liars almost come down to earth to mingle.

The lyrics on Sisterworld, when intelligible, are typically portentous and threatening, but with a dark hopefulness that most clearly perseveres in the stunning album finale, “Too Much, Too Much.” As with Drum’s Not Dead, Liars choose to cap off the disc with a gentle, cathartic piece that allows Angus Andrew to get downright syrupy after all that chaos.

“We’ll throw jackpots in the air/We’ll put flowers in your hair.”

Who knows what this album’s supposed to mean? Anything you want? Anything it makes you feel? Of Sisterworld, Andrew explained, “We're interested in the alternate spaces people create in order to maintain identity in a city like L.A. Environments where outcasts and loners celebrate a skewered relationship to society.”

One thing’s for sure: the always underappreciated and underestimated Liars are out to play again. Lock up your daughters and enjoy the madness.