On a Friday night in March, a day before the vernal equinox and a time for Pagan celebration, Liars had Detroit's nearly-full Magic Stick under their convulsive spell.

Opening with a noise freak-out-jam, the band took the stage with new drummer Julian Gross pounding the kick drum mindlessly with a blank stare and sick, 1970s cop-mustache on his face and an evening gown unfit for his figure and looking like a big, pink diaper on his body. Vocalist/guitar-noiseist Angus Andrew strummed a thin-sounding "thwaap," swinging his hair and showing off the best in bad dancing all night to the sound of mad-lab assistant, Aaron Hemphill's squealing feed-back rants and button pushing.

Liars They Were Wrong, So We Drowned 2004 Mute On They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, the follow-up to their much acclaimed debut They Threw us all in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, Liars abandon the smart, convulsing, heady hand-jive routine we all fell in love with (and memorialized them for) in favor of spooky marches to a beat that seems to have trouble making up its mind. Taking on the album-as-story persona, They Were Wrong… is hard to follow conceptually in terms of subject matter, since the vocals are blended into the mix as another musical element on most tracks aside from the opening one. The lyrics are meant to tell the story of an old European village killing off witches. However haunting it may be, you wouldn’t know this if someone hadn’t told you (although song titles like, "Broken Witch" and "There’s Always Room on the Broom" might have clued you in). There is no lyric sheet accompanying it, only some fun pencil sketches depicting the plot’s development. With its inconsistent song structures and few recognizable guitars-as-such to be found, the record relies heavily on mixes of electronic manipulations, sound samples and interesting arrangements of simple vocal and percussive elements. While the last record sounded like a bunch of snotty, freaked-out social club anthems, this one’s more like a snotty (really) freaked-out séance. However, to simply call this record a bunch of unlistenable noise (as some are doing) is a gross disservice to both the album’s achievements and to legions of uninspired kids in basements all across the Midwest (and the rest of the country, I can only imagine) churning out entire catalogues of CD-R releases of sheer bored horror. Calling it inaccessible is like conservative talk radio calling ABC News liberal. It’s bullshit. Yes, some of the songs are a little long. And some of them don’t have words, or seemingly, any real purpose or direction. But as an album, which seems to be the point this time around, there is a definite common thread. It’s an unsettling trance you can never quite get comfortable in—a monotonous barrage of interesting sounds whose source is no longer important. And yet these sounds distinctively make-up actual songs with real melodies. Anxiety tempered with the hope of relief. Infusing the avant-garde with the popular has been a calling card for alt-rock’s best since its inception. The next couple of records will determine whether or not Liars will be considered among those. I’ll be waiting in anticipation, hoping they can stay afloat. —Eric Gallippo May 2004

Just when it all seemed like it may melt into a big puddle of tedious pretense, the boys launched into a rousing rendition of "Hold Hands and it will Happen Anyway," possibly the only straight-forward rock offering from their newest record, They Were Wrong So We Drowned, thereby securing the audience's love for the rest of the night in one swooping gesture. They had them eating candy-corn out of their hands, chanting "oooh-ie-oooh, oooh, oooh" during "There's Always Room on the Broom," (to which Andrew replied in a proper Aussie accent, "That's the coolest thing we've heard out on tour"). They were screaming the witch-hunters' cant of "blood, blood, blood" at the close of "Broken Witch" and, perhaps most convincing, the call and response:

Andrew: "Fly, fly the devil's in you're eye, shoot shoot"

Crowd: "we're doomed, we're doomed."

And the new record had barely been out a month. If this new sound is supposed to be scary, it's scary like a Halloween party. They didn't play a single song off of their first LP and the crowd didn't care one bit. All right, maybe one bit, but it didn't take long for them to forget about it.

With the exception of a few shows in the plains states, most of the band's fans have been supportive of the new material, said Andrew from a phone somewhere in Colorado a few days later.

"We never want to intentionally upset our fans or anything, but the reality is that, unfortunately, the most important thing is really us and how we perceive ourselves and to be excited about what we're making. When it comes down to that, you really have no choice but to move on and kind of explore and make things for yourself and challenge yourself," he said.

The band's most recent musical explorations, Andrew acknowledged, may have cost them some positioning for the title of "next big thing" it seemed some were ready to throw at them after 2002's They Threw Us all in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top.

"We got to a point where we were really kind of popular and then we kind of sank the whole thing…and we put out this weird record. It sort of feels like we're back to square one," he said.

That weird record was made in May of 2003, in the woods of New Jersey at Andrew's own home. Having parted ways with their rhythm section late in 2002, Andrew and Hemphill added their friend Gross to help with the record.

"Right from when we started making it we knew this was how we wanted to work and how we wanted it to be. I can't tell you how super-happy and excited we were about the record," he said.

The idea, Andrew said, was to do something different from their first full-length and to apply some restraint.

"We basically spent as much time as possible with the drums. We mic-ed the drums in all sorts of stupid ways with pedals and stuff," he said. "We started with that and [would] see if it needed anything at all added to it. It's all about the drums and really trying to hold back on what we had. There's something really nice about certain drums, especially when they have certain textures."

The process was time-consuming and the end result, except for maybe a lack of typical instrumentation, sounds far from restrained. Heavy on drum programs, manipulated sounds and electronic samples, it's a studio album, which the band had to work hard at arranging for live performances.

"It took us two months to record it and then it took us exactly the same amount of time to learn how to play it," Andrew said.

Lyrically, the album follows the story of a village terrorized by witches and the way the villagers respond.

"We just did a whole bunch of research on 16th and 17th century witch hunts and also the fairy tales that went along with them and wrote a very generic fairy-tale that incorporated the elements we researched," Andrew said.

Through the course of the album, the villagers fight back, track down, burn and drown the accused minions of the devil. It's a story about fear told from the perspectives of both witch and hunter. If such a storyline conjures up recollections of Arthur Miller's anti-McCarthy drama, The Crucible, you're not really that far off.

"Like any good children's story, there's a moral, or a certain element that can be applied to the modern day," Andrew said.

"Minorities [are] being persecuted because majorities are set into a mind-set that is often times bordering on freakishly insane, and these [things] happen all the time throughout the ages. Obviously, when we were writing this record, America was invading Iraq, and you cannot avoid, I suppose, addressing that amazing, frightening terror," Andrew said.

But don't call it a concept album.

 "I think Britney Spears makes ‘concept' records, where a whole marketing team comes down and decides what image or concept they're gonna go for…and they push every song toward that idea, and to me, that's a concept. I think you can use that term rather loosely with a lot of people's work. I think it's just easier and more precise to explain what our record is by calling it a story. It literally is that. We wrote a scary fairy-tale and then wrote songs according to that narrative," Andrew said.

With time on their hands to spare after finishing the album, Liars went right to work on their next one.

"Records take months to come out and we were just kind of hanging out so we thought ‘let's just keep recording,' so by the time we were ready to go on tour we had put together a nice record. I don't know, maybe you could consider it a sequel. Not many people have heard it. I don't know yet what's going to happen."

Even though the band's next record will be similar, don't expect them to keep coming back to such sinister or mysterious subject matter.

"There's so much more else out there. We're not caught up in the idea of witchery or anything dark, for that matter. We might do an album about time-travel," Andrew said.

One can only hope that he was at least half-serious about that time-travel part.