Music

If doing something more than just once constitutes a pattern, then even noise-addicted members of the avant garde risk falling into a rut. There’s no danger of that for Liars, who’ve confounded expectation with their every album. Their 2001 calling card (recorded as a quartet) took its cues from Gang Of Four and started the punk-funk avalanche, but their malevolent follow-up sourced Chrome, cLOUDDEAD and Cabaret Voltaire. It was all change again for last year’s ‘Drum’s Not Dead’, a celebration of the not-so-gentle art of hitting things with sticks which leaned on tribal drumming and Krautrock grooves.

And now for something completely different – again. There will be those who are horrified by the idea of Liars besmirching themselves with anything as conventional as a tune, but they need not panic. Aside from the strikingly Beck-like ‘Houseclouds’, the wryly titled ‘Pure Unevil’ (an uncanny echo of ‘Just Like Honey’) and sweetly funereal closer, ‘Protection’, the grinding electronics, metallic clanging and general, FX-treated banging are still present. It’s just that melodicism has also been admitted. That won’t stop some crying ‘traitors!’, but had Liars ever been interested in striking the same match twice, they’d have been toast long ago.