Maybe it’s the two members with art-school backgrounds, but Liars have a knack for taking clichés to sublime places. Considering that the distance between their first album—the apex of dance-punk that might also be a joke at its expense—and the post-grunge miniature songcraft of 2007’s Liars seems smaller than some would have you believe, it makes sense that Sisterworld sounds like more of a conceptual wager than a stylistic one. Sisterworld maintains Liars’ sonic trappings but apparently deals with subcultural scenes as a means of maintaining identity in a city like LA. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees when Angus Andrew is singing lines like “Why’d you kill the bear with the gun?,” but for a band whose brilliance comes couched in stupidity, it’s on point.
