ALBUM REVIEWS
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ALBUM REVIEWS |
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The Tenebrous Liar
JACKKNIFED & SLAUGHTERED TV RECORDS 25.01.10 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk
What a terrible, terrible name for a band – isn’t a band name supposed to be at least memorable? A couple of hours after first receiving and listening to this album, I could not for the life of me remember the band’s name. Anyway, let’s not judge a book by its cover… As the name suggests they offer a heavy going brand of dark and gloomy rock, immediate comparisons that spring to mind are ill-fated 90’s misery merchants The God Machine and instrumental post-rock behemoths Explosions in the Sky – but with vocals. Portentous rumbling guitar combines with grumpy tormented vocals to form a fairly intense, ferocious sound on tracks like ‘Cut Down Your Love’ and ‘No Guiding Light’. Lyrical concerns of desperation, relationship breakdowns and emotional anguish and suffering ensure maximum melancholy levels are maintained. The title track is fantastic and blows away everything else on the album – six and a half minutes of anxious atmospherics created by Steve Gullick’s slurred vocals and a backing track which builds gradually before gloriously collapsing towards the end in a squall of feedback and crashing guitars and drums. The band are currently touring in support of this album, and I would imagine this stuff would sound tremendous reverberating around the clammy walls of your local fleapit pub venue. ‘A Different Tide’ is another highlight – huge sludgy riffs, enormous drum crescendos, and Gullick’s strained drawled out vocals create a brooding visceral experience – precisely just what you want from four minutes of rock music. Final track ‘Is This How It Ends?’ cunningly ends and then after 20 minutes of dead air chugs back into life before working its way through another ten minutes of instrumental guitar rumblings. So if you enjoy a healthy helping of distress, bitterness and misery with your pop music then you’ll find plenty to wallow along to on this album. So to summarise The Tenebrous Liar have an utterly awful name; but this is a pretty decent album - but not one to stick on at your next kid’s party. www.tenebrousliar.com |
