There’s an urban legend maintaining that if Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon is played in synchronicity with the film The Wizard Of Oz, the two function as mirror images of the same surreal dream, complete with the odd coincidental passage that would seem perfectly plausible if one were properly “influenced.” (Folklore or not, “Brain Damage” playing at precisely the same moment the Scarecrow sings “If I Only Had A Brain” is a bit creepy.)
But what if Dorothy’s understudy was a snail, and the film documented her slimy crawl up a staircase? Or if Oz’s quartet was replaced by three Claymation figures resembling a crude mash-up of Wallace and Gromit and Davey and Goliath? Or if Monty Python’s stream-of-consciousness animation—complete with flying, rotating slices of toast—was introduced during the section in which the movie migrates to color?

If you’re receiving the message that Liars’ third album, Drum’s Not Dead (Mute), is as much a cinematic experience as a musical one, it’s not accidental. The record’s 12 songs are accompanied by a DVD of three 45-minute videos conceived by the band and award-winning German filmmaker Markus Wambsganss (Lightning Bolts And Man Hands).

MAGNET spoke to Liars frontman Angus Andrew, a former art-school student and Brooklyn post-punk scene refugee now residing in Berlin.

After listening to the album, I now think of it as a movie with a really cool soundtrack. Or maybe more appropriately, three movies with the same cool soundtrack. Was it intentional to have it turn out to be such a cinematic-feeling project when you first began?
Well, I guess videos will do that, won’t they? [Laughs] We started off with a very cinematic approach to the music-making that tends to make up most of this album vs. just general songwriting. I understand what you’re saying; I think it’s a good thing, right?

It’s like seeing three different interpretations of the same story. It has some interesting implications for the rock album as a medium.
Well, in some ways, it’s too much, right? Two versions is almost like you can’t decide which one to use. For us it was a lot to do with the process of learning how to use this medium, really, each one of them is sort of individual in a sense, and the idea of letting them sort of run into each other was appealing to us.

The animation aspect of the first video reminds me of the cheesy, ’70s-era cartoon Davey And Goliath. It was quasi-religious, very primitive in terms of visuals.
Sort of like Wallace And Gromit, right? Julian (Gross, drummer) and I both went to an art school in L.A. where all of these different aesthetics kind of intermingled with one another. Stop-motion animation was a big part of that. When we started dabbling in video, one of the most exciting things to do was to try to animate a part of it and match that to the music.

Obviously you guys spent a lot of time and effort on not only the videos but also in developing these characters—Drum and Mt. Heart Attack—that appear throughout the album’s storyline. I hear one continuous song or narrative thread much more strongly than I hear 12 distinct songs.
Yeah, I think it’s all to do with this idea of trying to refigure out again how this idea of an album works, and how it’s supposed to work nowadays. It’s difficult for people to think about it as a full body of work anymore, and we’re always trying to make it that. What does it take to make it work now?

What were you guys thinking about with these two characters, Drum and Mt. Heart Attack?
On the previous album (2004’s They Were Wrong, So We Drowned), we had this really rigid process we stuck to and really knew what we were doing. On this one, we decided not to have any of that. Instead, we’d explore more individually what we were interested in, and we went through a lot of process, some hurdles, in getting there. By the time we got to a specific result, we’d thought about what the record was about, and realized that how it came together … was this intermingling of characters. The idea of being in a band, the minds that work together to make it happen, that’s not necessarily a given. The characteristics that everybody goes through—you’re confident one minute and then you’re not, you’re questioning what you’re doing. We were pretty aware that we were floating around and interchanging between the two. Some moments, one of us would feel really sure, and the next moment, it would no longer be that way. That’s how we ended up explaining this album. It’s more of a commentary about process.

I remember interviews with Roger Waters and Pink Floyd around the time Wish You Were Here was released in the mid-‘70s. The band was so stuck trying to top Dark Side Of The Moon that it became almost creatively immobile. So the album became a commentary on creative paralysis.
It wasn’t quite that way for us, but a lot of bands … the public kinds of takes it for granted that beyond the spectacular aspects of personalities clashing or fistfights or something like that, how do you get different minds on the same page? That process is what I attribute to what is good about Liars and why the music is good in the end. In the initial stages, we had to fight through a lot to get this end result into our heads.

Drums seem like a really core compositional element for you; this album made me envision rhythm as the lead instrument in most instances. Within the genre of indie or art rock, that’s not an approach you usually find, or one that works.
No, that’s absolutely true. This is why Drum’s not dead, why he became a character, almost a fourth member of the band. It’s true, totally, that in many instances, drums were the place where we could start—that rhythm could be melodic, that it formed the basis for a limited sound that could come on top of that. A lot of that has to do with a general interest in hip hop. From the outset, we see Drum, based upon the beat, as central to the music. This is how all of that came to fruition.

How much did your move to Berlin affect the sound and compositional changes on the record? I kept thinking about other artists who’d moved to Berlin for varying reasons: Bowie during the Low period, or U2 circa Achtung Baby.
The inspiration to move to Berlin had everything to do with finances. We were on the road so frequently, eight months out of the year, and whether any of us could afford to keep a place in New York while we did this. My idea was simply that we could live in Berlin year-round for a quarter of the price, and so we could use it as a base during European trips, especially Eastern European. I also realized at some point that I’d been living in America for over 10 years, and that was sort of a freak-out moment for me. I realized there was more I could draw from by living in Europe, by living in a building with bulletholes in it. Here in Europe, I’m surveying the carcass of war. And in Los Angeles, Aaron (Hemphill, guitarist) and Julian, living downtown, are surveying the point just before that happens. [Laughs] This relationship has been important—not just living in Berlin, but the contrast between the two.

You’re used to this sort of movement, though, right? Weren’t you born and raised in Australia? After living there, and in different places in America, and now Berlin, it would seem that movement could be legitimately put forward as a constant theme in your music.
I was actually born in the Philippines, although I spent all my formative teenage years in Australia. But it was a freak-out to see Sydney, the place where I grew up, and realize that I’d lived in the States longer than I’d lived in Sydney. That was really scary to me.

No matter your politics, it’s clear that what America means to the world today is significantly different, and in some cases scarier or more intimidating, than what it did in the ’90s.
That’s completely true. The question for me came down to whether or not I needed or even wanted to be a part of that anymore. Maybe it’s a bit of a privilege issue, I’m not from there, so it’s not instinctual to me to call it home. So the possibility of going to live in a country where views are different, it was refreshing in and of itself. And it was refreshing in all aspects, especially creatively, for the band.

Having said everything I did earlier about the album, I have to tell you that “The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack” is the most amazing composition you guys have put together so far. Maybe the first thing I can imagine hearing by Liars on the radio. Or playing for my mom.
[Laughs, relieved] Oh my god, I thought you were going to say something completely different—the most crap thing you’d ever heard, or whatever. It’s so scary to put out for us. We’re still at this point where it’s something of a mystery to us, something we’ll end up being happy with or not. It was an interesting part of this record for us; attacking the notion of what it means to be a musician, I’ve never really felt like I was at all capable of holding that label. But I did want to try. Sitting down and using an acoustic guitar to make a song for this record was a real big challenge for me formally. In that way, this is sort of like the aspect of the album to me that was most challenging, putting something down that makes you a little uncomfortable but can still turn out fine.

I’ve read interviews where you’ve declared that you’re a “non-musician” and I think, to coin the phrase, this song probably makes a bit of a liar out of you.
Well… [silence] that’s just entirely flattering, really. When I think of that song, I hope that our fans can appreciate the idea of change. Things aren’t always gonna stay the same with us musically. I can’t tell you what the reaction will be. We did play it live, and live, things are always considerably different than on record, so it will be interesting to see how people feel about it once they hear how it was rendered on the record. I’m surrounded by people who are obsessed with records, with iTunes, with downloads, with whether the album will survive as an artform. And things like this really put the onus back on the artist, I think, to make the music interesting enough again to stand on its own. We tried to overflow this one with stuff. [Laughs] The question is, should we be looking at the album as something more than just a collection of singles, or whatever. Hopefully this one at least generates some dialogue, and the artists will start taking responsibility for their art again.

Where do you guys go from here? Is there another place you can visit conceptually, or do you find yourselves returning to individual tracks or composition again?
That’s an interesting question. The aftermath of getting through the production of this record, the material we’ve been making immediately following this one has been rough, and mean, and big and wild. If we recorded our next record today, it would probably turn out more like a Germs record! [Laughs] I don’t know if that’s backtracking or not.

Do you have any particularly funny stories from your time in Berlin?
Practically every day there are those kinds of stories. Small things are great. When you go over to someone’s house, on their kitchen table they have a jar that’s designated for just chocolate powder. People here are kind of obsessed with chocolate milk, and that’s a good thing, I think. They’re really serious about it over here. There’s a childlike quality about that which I really appreciate.