They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top - Liars (2001)

Quality or nostalgia: was younger me onto something, or just on something?

Here’s another one that’s more journal than review.

For about a year or so in 02-03 I had a job I really hated. I was pretty well launched on the Buddhist eightfold path at the time, including the concept of “right livelihood”: that you shouldn’t make your living ripping off other people. Like, say, you work for a car lot whose entire business plan is to sell car loans to people who can’t afford them and then repossess the cars to sell again. It was a maddening place to try to justify showing up, not to mention I had a boss whom I did not admire or respect.

My musical taste probably narrowed into the angry and intense band because of this. In addition, people who don’t remember the aftermath of 9/11 in America can’t fully understand what a bleak place we suddenly found ourselves in. The frustration and catharsis on records like this was a frequent soundtrack to that era for me, which is probably why this one sticks in my head so vividly.

Liars were an interesting band who never stuck with one sound. Their bread and butter was noisy and grating punk that you could move to, the deep end of a really interesting thread of neo-garage, dance-punk, whatever you want to call it, that would be much more successful for subsequent bands like LCD Soundsystem, The Strokes, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

So is it Quality or Nostalgia?

It’s angry and immediate and confrontational in a way that spoke to me at the time. I don’t listen to as much of that today, but stuff like this teleports me back to choppier and angrier days. It’s a little nostalgia, and unfortunately a little deja vu.

The Moral of the Story: I got laid off from that shitty job, a few months before the whole thing was shut down under predatory lending laws (Iowa’s laws, to be clear. Basically all financial crime is legal in South Dakota). Shortly after, I got a call out of the clear blue from a high school friend who asked if I wanted a shot with his web agency. That gig would be the beginning of respectable employment for me, the beginning of my formation as a professional, and the first time I would think of my skills as a vocation rather than a grift or a hustle. All of this might have happened some other way but it happened this way. So while I can’t completely say I buy the “everything happens for a reason” line of argument, I will say that we are all part of a larger process that isn’t always fair to each of us but can offer salvation if we’re open to it.