Top 25 Albums Of The Decade (#4)

4) LIARS – Drum’s Not Dead (2006)

In order to fully appreciate Drum’s Not Dead, one must have a decent familiarity with Liars’ history. The three-piece began as a nasty punk/no-wave outfit that, back in 2001, released an album entitled They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top. It was angry, loud, screaming music—half of which was taken up by the thirty-minute mindfuck “This Dust That Makes That Mud.” Three years later they released They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, a similarly bile-fueled noisefest based on Walpurgis Night mayhem and the witch trials of the Harz Mountains. Or something. The album received lukewarm to downright hostile reviews. Rolling Stone magazine famously said, “Making a record about fear is one thing; making a record you fear listening to is quite another.” In short, Liars’ career had reached a crux point, and the band was faced with the choice of either persisting in their well-established mood or abandoning it entirely. Well, you can probably guess which route they took. Tearing a page from the Bowie/Eno exegesis of weirdness, the band relocated from New York to Berlin and began working on their third record. What they ended up creating was almost a Total Protonic Reversal from what came before. Piercing, distorted guitar is replaced by metallic clean tones (that somehow still manage to make your brain rattle around inside your skull); snare-bashes replaced by pounding Rite Of Spring tom-toms; painful yells replaced by falsetto singing; tear-down-the-barricade rage replaced by a vibe that’s similar to being trapped inside the Ghostbusters’ “storage facility.” Like its predecessor, Drum’s Not Dead functions as a loose concept album. The story basically comes down to two primal antagonists (“Drum” = creative energy, “Mt. Heart Attack” = fear/self-doubt) beating the ever-loving fuck out of one another for forty-seven minutes. The opening song, “Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack!,” will cause all the pores on your skin to freeze shut, only to be flooded open again with cold sweat upon the opening banshee howls of “Let’s Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack” in probably the best track-one-to-track-two transition since Sgt. Pepper. Yes, this is one of those records—listen to any song on its own and it will make no sense. But put them all together (in perfect order, I must add) and you have an album with one hell of a sense of trajectory. Long stretches of terror are interspersed with quiet reflection, moments of sadness and even a foreshadowing (“Drum Gets A Glimpse”) of ultimate catharsis. Which leads me to the last track, “The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack,” the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel and the reason you’ve withstood a panic attack for the previous forty-two minutes—an experience that can only be compared to meeting your guardian angel for the first time. In fact, I’m getting chills just thinking about it. Not so much an album as an experience, Drum’s Not Dead is proof that adventurousness still exists in modern music. Not only that, but a testament to perseverance and creativity, and a reason to get up in the morning. 10/10, unquestionably.