Plaster Casts of Everything

"Plaster Casts of Everything" arrives from the rawer, more confrontational period of early Liars — before the tribal experiments, still rooted in a downtown New York post-punk energy that had absorbed the roughest edges of Wire and Gang of Four and pushed them toward something more feral. The rhythm section drives hard and angular, guitar lines that cut across the beat rather than sitting inside it, creating a feeling of perpetual slight displacement, as though the song is always about to lose its footing but never quite does. There's a sardonic intelligence in the delivery — Andrew singing with a detached, almost spoken-word affect that keeps the listener at arm's length even as the music itself is physically insistent. The song's central concern is with surfaces and representations, with the gap between things and their documentation, and that conceptual restlessness maps onto the music's own refusal to settle into comfort. Production keeps everything slightly raw, the guitar tones abrasive rather than pretty, drums recorded with an immediacy that puts the listener in the room. It belongs to the tradition of bands who understood that dissonance is a moral position as much as an aesthetic one. You play this for someone who has grown bored with rock music that knows too well what it's supposed to sound like — it's a reminder that the form contains more friction than most of its practitioners choose to use.