Cackling all the way home

When an album as remarkably strange as Liar's They Were Wrong, So We Drowned surfaces, no amount of descriptive adjectives or loosely fitting metaphors can really do justice to the sheer weirdness of the music. Perhaps the easiest way to describe Drowned is with a short, declarative sentence. Here it goes: New York City art-punks Liars have made a concept album about witches.

If that sounds like a stupid topic for a rock album to you, then find comfort in the fact that Liars couldn't care less what you think. Scorn for the listener is practically the band's modus operandi. On their debut, they repeated the final five notes of their closing track for 30 minutes straight, filling every last second of disc space with a composition that surely tested most people's endurance and gave a whole new meaning to the word "filler."

Liars have always been the most unpredictable group in the New York City conglomerate of post-punk revivalists. Take, for example, their name: it's just "Liars," not "The Liars." After all, "the" is a definite article best suited to preening, cokehead fashion models-cum-rock stars like the Strokes, the Vines, or the Hives, not a threesome of musical terrorists headed by a grim-faced Australian who stands at a reported 6 feet, 6 inches.

At first glance, the "the" issue seems gimmicky and pedantic, but witness how difficult it makes things: "Hey, I just saw a great band last night," you say to your friend. "Oh really," your friend replies. "What was their name?" If you immediately answer "the Liars," as most are apt to do, then the band has scored a point against your preconceived bourgeois norms, loser.

They Were Wrong, So We Drowned is the musical equivalent of Liars excluding "the" from their name, or turning the last 30 minutes of their debut into a stop-button dare. Liars haven't released the noisiest or even the most challenging record in recent memory, but they have managed to create the most hectoring testament to listener disdain since Lou Reed recorded an hour of ear-splitting guitar feedback and called it a masterpiece, or Johnny Rotten got rid of the Albatross with PiL.

In fact, Rotten's post-Sex Pistols band, Public Image Ltd., is probably the best point of comparison for They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, in sound as well as intent. Both bands are obsessed with turning the conventions of popular music inside-out, leaving ghoulish reminders of choruses and guitar solos in their wake.

PiL did it by grafting the traditional punk anthem onto the spacey, hollow dynamics of dub. Liars, following Rotten and Co.'s lead, have turned the burgeoning NYC dance-punk sound -- exemplified by the Rapture's "shake! shake! shake!" cattle calls and ironic usage of cowbells -- into a gloomy doppelganger which can't dance because it's crippled. The more people this music alienates, the better: that's the point.

Keeping with this tradition, Liars have chosen to wisely emulate the bands of the past who have been best at alienating prospective fans. The aforementioned PiL influence can be heard everywhere on Drowned, but so can Sonic Youth, This Heat, Cabaret Voltaire, Silver Apples, and some Tom Waits for variety.

Witches and the supernatural somehow fit into this stew too, but exactly where is uncertain. There are songs called "Broken Witch" and "There's Always Room on the Broom," and the band-members themselves announced via their website that they had been inspired by the German holiday of Walpurgisnacht, when, legend has it, witches fly to Brocken Mountain on broomsticks. Is this all a joke? Another ploy to piss off five-boroughs hipster-kids? Does it even matter? Probably not. But it's hard to take a line like "Grab your cauldron and get down!" that seriously.

What does matter is this: They Were Wrong, So We Drowned is a great album because of, not in spite of, its difficulty.