The Born Liars, “Don’t Tell Me, I Know”/”I Don’t Know Why”

Loud. No, really — loud. I’m discovering that if you don’t listen to the Born Liars’ latest 7″ with the volume cranked to levels likely to piss off the people around you, well, you’re honestly missing out. You’re missing the scraping, raw, garage-rawk fury that boils through the brutal tell-off A-side, “Don’t Tell Me, I Know,” the bitter vitriol channelled through Jimmy Sanchez and Scott McNeil’s guitars, Bill Fool’s thudding bass, and Josh Wolf’s snapping drums. And if you can’t dig your way through that, you’re also missing the wonderfully-crafted, Romantics-esque pop song lurking beneath. It’s a sour little anti-love grenade of a song, thrown with cynical carelessness at its subject.

The B-side cover of Stevie Wonder’s classic “I Don’t Know Why,” on the other hand, takes a lighter to a picture of the girl in question and lets it burn slow, the perfect downtrodden companion to the Liars’ own more upbeat track. Where Wonder always seemed to be trying to deal with his pain and move on, Sanchez and company sound like they could give a fuck about working through the loss, instead wallowing at the back end of a glass ’til the hurt stops on its own. Hell, you can even hear somebody pop open a can of beer at the start of the song; fucking brilliant.