Melissa Conser reports from that Liars / No Age show (last local No Age show for a while, for those tracking bands) last week with a piece she calls “I’m A Liar”:


PAUL CHACOLLA

Friday night I waited front and center at the El Rey. I could hear Liars warming up. There was a light coming from under the curtains accenting the premature drumbeats of a show in progress. The lights dim—a sure sign that they’ll come on any second. The curtains open and Angus Andrew is sitting on a stool at arm’s length from me. They start with “Leather Prowler” off their latest self-titled album. Stage left, Aaron Hemphill (guitar) sings like an eerie owl. Angus stays on his stool, rocking the microphone back and forth and wrapping his legs around the stand. Their older album Drum’s Not Dead had more of a tribal drum-circle feel, which has been turned down to allow the band to work toward a more industrial direction. The contrast in the albums could be seen in Angus himself. For Drum’s Not Dead songs, he’d stay in one place, singing like a child crying for mother, but songs off the latest album sent him into a wide-eyed mechanized dance. About 11:30 the band says thanks and good night—they’d been playing a little over an hour. Angus walks away, looking worn. He stoops to put his microphone on an amp, and it drops from his hand to the floor. He walks offstage indifferent. The audience taunts them: “Liars! Liars!” Not an effort to get an encore—an accusation. And the band knows it. Back they come one by one to pick up their instruments and play. Angus is last and looking disoriented until he finds his microphone where he dropped it. He picks it up and sings, then throws the microphone into the crowd and some young girl gets it. Eventually, he realizes he has lost his microphone again, and when he sees the girl, he cracks his first genuine smile of the night. He dedicates the next song to her—says he knows what the girl feels, a feeling not in your brain “but from your gut. And that is… YEAHHH!” The whole house yells with him into the next song and now they are done with L.A. And where were you during this amazing show, hm?

Tags: el rey, liars