Liars’ debut CD, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, begins innocently enough with lead singer Angus Andrew repeating the lines "Everybody in his or her own life needs a hobby/Fills the voids that work and rent create/We can win." But Andrew’s façade of self-control crumbles as he works himself into a frenzy with the repeated refrain "Can you hear us?/Can you hear us?/Can you hear us?/Can you hear us?/We got our finger on the pulse of America!" The rest of the band pound out a muscular backbeat bolstered by heavy-handed bass and covered with a mess of effects-laden guitar. The intensity is nothing short of anthemic, yet it’s never clear who or what Andrew is targeting. "The idea really is just to plant a seed," the Australian-born singer explains over the phone from his adopted home of Brooklyn. "There’s no solution, no answer — the point is to try and get you to think about anything rather than just one thing in particular."

In contrast to the directness of "Grown Men Don’t Fall in the River, Just like That" the last track, "This Dust Makes That Mud," is a 30-minute down-tempo dirge driven by a molasses-thick bass line. It starts with distracted vocals from Andrew that are half-sung/half-spoken and ominous high-pitched guitar noises that bring to mind a noisy flock of mechanical, metallic birds. Slowly the song disassembles. Andrew’s vocals drop out, and the last 20 minutes is constructed on a three-second loop of bass, drums, and guitar. The repetition evolves from meditative to numbing to aggravating. Andrew explains, "People have had such different reactions to it. Some think it’s like a snub or something. But for once you can put one of our songs on as background music."

All of Liars’ discordant but catchy songs are prone to shifting gears with little warning — for example, from a danceable disco-inflected groove to an all-out buzzsaw guitar assault. Giving order to the chaos is the rhythm section of Ron Albertson on drums and Pat Nature on bass. Nature is often prominent in the mix, as if his bass were a lead guitar, whether he’s affecting a dance beat or aiming to reproduce the rumbling of a tractor trailer rolling by in low gear. "We got a lot of influence for that from hip-hop," Andrew allows. "Hip-hop has that repetitive drum and bass always going, and the bass and drums are often the most important musical elements to the song."

Liars, who come to the Middle East next Thursday, fit the mold of an up-and-coming band in the borough of Brooklyn, which has turned out to be a fertile realm for the emergence of indie avant-rock over the past four or five years. They came together in late 2000 when Andrew and LA art-school chum guitarist Aaron Hemphill crossed paths. The pair hooked up with transplanted Nebraskans Nature and Albertson, who were both performing in obscure local bands at the time. By January of 2001, Liars had played their first live gig. A year later, after criss-crossing the country twice, they were signed to Blast First, whose early releases included material by Sonic Youth, Big Black, the Butthole Surfers, and Dinosaur Jr. Now a Mute Records imprint, Blast First agreed to reissue Liars’ debut, which had originally come out on Brooklyn’s Gern Blandsten label, helping earn the band an opening spot on a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion tour.

"I didn’t think our music was something that would get as far around the public as it has," Andrew admits. But the band’s mix of politically charged lyrics and off-kilter, avant-rock arrangements fills the void left by all those "punk" bands who are pop enough to hit the commercial airwaves but not rebellious-rock enough to evoke the spirit of seminal politicized punks like Gang of Four and the Clash. Liars have in fact been compared with Gang of Four, as well as with John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd., Nick Cave’s Birthday Party, and even Rage Against the Machine. But though Andrew doesn’t exactly flinch at the mention of these comparisons, it’s clear he sees them as a limiting factor. "That’s essentially what the title of the album is talking about — not being easily pigeonholed or taking whatever’s happened and putting it in a trench and having a little monument built in its honor so that forever it’ll be known as this or that. We want to avoid being something that’s so simply labeled and kept in a box."

Liars play the Middle East next Thursday, August 29. Call (617) 864-EAST.