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Tenebrous
Liar release a limited edition 4 track EP, Pretender
on November 23rd to coincide with the first of their shows
supporting Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. Available in
download format and on limited CD via mailorder from TV
Records. The E.P. was mixed by Richard Warren, best
known for his work with Echoboy, Spiritualized and
Soulsavers, who also plays on three of the songs.
Tracks: Pretender (taken from the Last Stand
album), Now It’s Over, Sour (remix) and
Paradise Don’t Come Cheap.
“If
Leonard Cohen brings a smile to your face and you are partial
to a bit of low-fi then Tenebrous Liar is the band for you.”
THE SUN
“Imagine Lift To Experience stuck in the eternal damnation
their songs tried to escape from, but with a result more ashcan
reality than spiritually vivid.”
DROWNED IN SOUND
"Tenebrous Liar purvey a dark, doomed and deliciously
damaged style of cosmic/ambient rock melancholy, which is
nevertheless hugely uplifting"
TIMEOUT
“Ultimately, this debut occupies a murky place in a collective
musical psyche that may make your stereo frown. It1s not pretty,
it1s largely devoid of hope and direction, yet crucially -
it still has the power to uplift. It1s really good.”
MOJO
Tenebrous
Liar’s Last Stand
October 6th 2008 CD release/ October 5th 2008 Download release
There’s a moment, late in the apocalyptic moments of
the final, eponymous track of Tenebrous Liar’s
new album, where the sounds of feedback, distortion, destruction
and collapse can’t help but conjure the image of a studio
strewn with wrecked, damaged, spent instruments, the aftermath
of such honest, blood-flecked, thrilling catharsis. One can
only imagine how band leader Steve Gullick’s lens would
capture such a scene. As evidenced by his recent, acclaimed
photographic exhibition – also called Tenebrous, and
which has, like Steve’s group, also toured the globe
– both Steve’s photography and music captures moments
of drama, of struggle. On Tenebrous Liar’s Last Stand,
that struggle ends in triumph, electrifyingly won.
Steve Gullick’s name has long been familiar to many disciples
of dark and wonderful rock noise. Followers of the music press
had thrilled for years to his live photographs, capturing
the ecstatic chaos of performance, or his intense portraits,
casting both rock legends and rock hopefuls in heroic and
iconic light. Working for Melody Maker in the early to mid
90’s Gullick was a crucial factor in the early coverage
of America’s burgeoning underground scene.
A decade later, in 2001 Gullick & friends set about creating
Careless Talk Costs Lives, a high-quality independent
magazine conceived to run for twelve issues, a project that
cast Gullick’s lens towards a new generation of outstanding
artists, a mission continued through the beautiful Loose
Lips Sink Ships magazine.
Gullick had been recording songs intermittently since the
late 90s, following the purchase of the kind of four-track
tape recorder found in every musician’s bedroom. By 2004,
the loft of his East London home, where most of the work on
his magazines occurred, swiftly became cluttered with guitars,
amplifiers, microphones, pedals, recording devices and boxes
of blank reel-to-reel tape.
His first recordings, as .bender, were made all over
the house; the bathroom offered particularly good acoustics,
and enabled Gullick’s three young sons to add vocals
if they so desired. Swiftly, however, the project evolved;
Gullick found regular collaborators in old friends James Johnston
(leader of Gallon Drunk and suave Bad Seed)
and painter Geraldine Swayne, they collectively became ...bender
and produced a slew of darkly magical, turbulent recordings.
Tenebrous, meanwhile, began as an outlet for non-…bender
ideas, before morphing into Tenebrous Liar. Both …bender
and Tenebrous Liar have recorded prolifically and performed
live regularly, ...bender notably supporting Bonnie ‘Prince’
Billy and Mercury Rev, Tenebrous Liar playing South
By Southwest and touring last Summer with Josh T Pearson
and Soulsavers, who Steve joined on guitar alongside
old friend Mark Lanegan.
This pre-history brings us, neatly or gnarly, to Tenebrous
Liar’s Last Stand. Those early solo bathroom recordings
have evolved, without losing any of their intimacy, honesty
or smouldering, macabre power. Tenebrous Liar are a
full band, and what they play is rock music, albeit a dark
and twisted form, haunted by the blues, burnished by emotion,
with a vulnerability glowering where lesser groups have only
empty swagger.
The album was recorded in a single thirteen hour session,
under the aegis of friend and collaborator Richard Warren,
perhaps best known for his work with Echoboy, Spiritualized
and Soulsavers. Overdubs were added later, at Steve’s
and Rich’s houses, as was the album’s brooding,
menacing opening track, ‘Blood Moon’, which
Gullick claims was written on a Tuesday, recorded on a Wednesday,
and mixed that Thursday. Certainly, nothing about the song
feels rushed, Gullick’s weary croon wreathed in the crackle
and buzz of an old 78, couched in the uneasy reverb of bruised
guitar and gospel organ.
From hereon in, things get darker, heavier, gloriously intense.
‘Pretender’ rocks bluntly, with the stately
lurch of Crazy Horse, and a nagging chorus hook, its
sleazy vamp the equal of ‘One Last Time’s
aching melancholy. For the pounding ‘Sour’
the group stir up a motorik groove, while ‘Alight’
imagines deliriously cacophonic gloom-pop as Dinosaur Jr
might’ve scored it. It’s the closing tracks
that provoke the deepest shivers, however: ‘Tenebrous
Liar’, a soulful sonic storm that rolls in, quaking and
squalling like a lost chapter to The Lift To Experience’s
The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads; and ‘Last Stand’,
a splintering, cathartic blast with many false endings, stirring
up a similar sense of profound disquiet as Nirvana’s
In Utero. It's on such a droning, draining note that Tenebrous
Liar leave us, sated and moved and rocked, but profoundly.
There's no doubt that, since that moment, new dark inspiration
has flowered within the Tenebrous Liar rehearsal rooms, but
Last Stand provides plenty food for the thought, until
the group next arise.
Tony Ash guitar, bass
Alex Brown backing vocals
Steve Gullick vocals, guitar
James Maiden guitar
Pete Spiby drums, backing vocals
Richard Warren guitar, organ
Brendan Casey, bass
LIVE
AT THE BLACK GARDENIA NOVEMBER 2008
In
an intimate Soho club, Tenebrous Liar make a stand for
mavericks everywhere. The rotating members, centred around
mouthpiece Steve Gullick, tailor their exquisite avant garde
Americana to suit the occasion, with a living music that fills
every corner of the room. The first of their two sets finds
them getting ambient, with muffled drones and indistinct howling,
but later you can hear the restless ghosts of grunge in the
smothered melodies and heavy noise storms of "Pretender".
Splendid.
Dele Fadele NME
TENEBROUS
LIAR'S LAST STAND - 2008
Since 2007's self titled album Steve Gullick has been
busying himself assembling a far more focused set of brooding
songs, fusing Cohen, Earth and the more dissonant aspects
of Queens Of The Stone Age and, whisper it, Nirvana, into
a raging slab of aural murk that brings to mind the same unease
a Halloween jaunt round an abandoned asylum might. Recorded
in one session with friend and Spiritualized conspiritor Richard
Warren, songs such as "Doomed", "One Way Love"
and aching opener "Blood Moon" create a scintillating
claustrophobia as the expansive guitar and organ driven sound
fills every possible free space. Closer "Last Stand"
is a full on declaration of war and makes you pray the title
is merely in jest.
Jonathan Sebire Rock A Rolla
"Musically their second album Last Stand recalls Shellac,
Liars and Nirvana at their most bloody-minded and amusical."
The Quietus
"Dinosaur Jr meets Nirvana's In Utero – yep, it's
not pretty and it sure ain't going to win any Brit awards,
but its macabre melancholy is stunningly executed, complete
with jagged Velvet Underground guitar."
Selby Times
"Tenebrous Liar’s Last Stand is at it’s best
during the slowest moments, when the guitars are drawn out
in all their dark, jagged, droning, menacing glory; the vocals
almost playing second fiddle, but reinforcing the darkness
and the feeling of vast emptiness and unknowns that the provocative
artwork of an inky skyline and menacing forest first invokes."
Subba Culture
"From the hyperactive two-short-plank riffing of early
Nirvana, to Dinosaur Jr’s laconic fuzz-splurges, to Mudhoney’s
sack-o-bricks lurches and Tad and The Melvins’ ear sludge,
the album ‘Tenebrous Liar’s Last Stand’, from
his band Tenebrous Liar, is a veritable inventory of that
era in American underground music. And not just that, it’s
catalogued damn well and in such a way that they can probably
count Nick Cave’s Grinderman and whatever band Mark Lanegan
is involved in this week as current peers."
Crud Magazine
"It comes across as such an organic album. Whilst it
won’t be charging up the charts any time soon, this is
a record which, given time, will grow in both sound and stature.
And there just aren’t enough of those around these days."
isthismusic.com
"The band's second album, Last Stand, at times recalls
the miserable post-punk of Joy Division and occasionally the
lo-fi indie of Slint's brilliant Spiderland."
The Skinny
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