By Jesse Cataldo

True to its title, the drums are alive on the Liars new album. Whether beating in tribal fury or droning in an assembly line grind they form its core, shaping a turgid, murky block of noise into an amazingly effective album. To create Drum’s Not Dead, the band fled Williamsburg and settled in Berlin, where they recorded in a former East German radio broadcast center, essentially pushing themselves deeper into the self-style atmosphere of off-kilter eeriness that they explored on 2004’s They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. Unsurprisingly, many of elements of the two albums are the same – the chanted vocals, the ringing guitar work, the hanging black clouds of gloomy dread pierced by flashes of bizarre humor. Yet Drum emerges as the better work, its gloom manages to dance as well as hover, and the propulsive drums give the songs legs that those on Drowned lacked. The sound quality is also pitch-perfect, with each note cutting through the murky border like a lighthouse beam through fog. None of this should suggest that Drum is an easy listen. It’s still a challenge in many regards, thick and cryptic and covered in fuzz. But it’s also refreshingly unpretentious, and thanks to its drums, remarkably cohesive and catchy.